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countdown: vegas

chapter fifty four | series masterlist | ao3

dean winchester x oc

i don't believe in god, but i believe that you're my savior

when you live a life that never allows you to understand the existence of home, you start to find it in other places. people, too. dean winchester's home is the driver's side seat of the impala, and always with sam next to him. bunny norton's home is across an ocean, and preferably as far away from dean winchester as possible. when they asked her all those years ago for her help, she'd come running. but dean makes her wish every day that she hadn't stayed.

slow burn, enemies to lovers. they hate bang in chapter four, but that's just to add flavor to the hate. canon is followed whenever i feel like it, tags will be updated as story progresses. slightly OOC dean in the first few chapters bc i like when the pretty man angry…

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vegas 3 months, 6 days, 2 hours 02:05:30

Dean woke up feeling like someone had split his skull open with a tire iron and packed the space behind his eyes with broken glass and cheap whiskey, the pain sharp and throbbing with every sluggish beat of his heart as consciousness dragged him unwillingly toward the surface.

For a long moment, he didn’t move. Couldn’t, really. His face was half buried in something soft enough to swallow him whole, the pillow cool against his overheated skin, and every inch of his body felt heavy in that deep, unpleasant way that came from drinking far past the point of good decisions and straight into self-destruction. Somewhere beneath the pounding ache in his head, nausea rolled slowly and viciously through his stomach, warning him not to sit up too fast unless he wanted to repaint whatever room he’d crashed in the night before. Dean breathed through it, one hand creeping sluggishly up to press against his forehead while his brain attempted the slow, painful process of catching up to reality.

Vegas.

Right. Vegas.

Bits of it came back in disconnected fragments first, flickering loose through the fog in his head without context attached to them. Neon lights bleeding across rain-slick pavement. Bunny laughing somewhere beside him. Sam bitching about card counting while Dean ignored him on principle. Tequila. Too much tequila, apparently. He remembered music, loud enough to rattle through his ribs, remembered Bunny smoking beneath a canopy of lights while the desert wind tugged strands of dark hair across her mouth.

A low groan crawled out of him before he could stop it, muffled into the pillow. Jesus Christ.

Dean Winchester did not get hungover anymore. Not really. Years of drinking enough liquor to kill lesser men had built him into something half-pickled and chemically preserved, his body usually capable of bouncing back after a few hours and a greasy breakfast, no matter how ugly the night before had gotten. This, however, felt biblical. The kind of hangover he hadn’t experienced since he was nineteen and angry at the entire goddamn world, sitting on the hood of the Impala with a stolen bottle of Rumple Minze clenched in his fist and enough unresolved rage in his chest to poison a city reservoir.

He cracked one eye open with visible effort, immediately regretting it when sunlight speared straight through his skull hard enough to make him hiss under his breath. The room around him blurred at first, all color and shape bleeding together while his brain struggled to catch up with what his eyes were seeing, and for several long seconds, he simply stared without comprehension, breathing shallowly against the pillow while his thoughts slogged uselessly through his head.

This wasn’t right.

That realization came slowly, surfacing through the haze with a creeping sense of wrongness that prickled beneath his skin before he could fully place why. What should have been some cheap, dim little motel room on the shitty side of Vegas—floral bedspread older than Sam, cigarette burns in the carpet, suspicious stains Dean chose not to think about—was instead something out of a goddamn luxury magazine spread. The duvet tangled around his legs was thick and expensive enough that he could feel the weight of it even through the ache in his body, the sheets soft against his skin in a way motel linens never were, and when his gaze finally managed to drag itself further across the room, the confusion only deepened.

Tall ceilings stretched overhead, cream-colored and elegant instead of nicotine-stained. Actual artwork hung on the walls, framed properly instead of the mass-produced paintings that motels bought in bulk to hide mildew damage. The carpet looked clean enough to sleep on voluntarily, which felt fundamentally unnatural to Dean on every conceivable level. No buzzing fluorescent lights. No weird damp smell clinging to the air. No distant sounds of fighting through paper-thin walls.

A massive bank of floor-to-ceiling glass dominated the far side of the room, sunlight pouring through in molten gold as the Vegas strip glittered beyond it in sharp flashes of glass and steel, the city sprawled out beneath him like something unreal. Way too high up. Way too expensive. Way too nice for a place Dean would willingly spend money on unless somebody else was footing the bill.

His brow furrowed deeper into the pillow. “Fuck,” he muttered hoarsely, voice rough with sleep and liquor.

The words barely made it out before another pulse of nausea rolled through him hard enough to force his eyes shut again. Dean swallowed thickly against it, one hand blindly fumbling against the mattress like he expected to find a beer bottle, a gun, his jeans, anything that might explain how the hell he’d ended up here.

The bed beside him felt cold where his hand had landed, smooth silk and empty space instead of another body, and his sluggish brain had only just begun preparing itself for the possibility that he’d somehow managed to lose both Sam and Bunny somewhere in the black hole between tequila shots and sunrise when he forced himself to roll onto his back with another low, miserable groan. Every muscle in his body protested the movement immediately, his stomach twisting unpleasantly as the room tilted for half a second beneath him, but at least changing position let him see more than the goddamn pillow.

That was when he spotted her.

Curled near the edge of the massive bed like she’d collapsed there sometime before dawn and never moved again, Bunny slept faced away from him beneath the tangled sheets, dark hair spilled messily across one of the expensive pillows in waves that looked almost black in the low golden light pouring through the windows. One bare shoulder peeked out from beneath the duvet, freckles scattered across pale skin in constellations. Dean knew it was her before he even properly saw her face. Even half-dead from alcohol poisoning and confusion, some part of him had catalogued the shape of her.

Still, he leaned closer anyway, squinting through the sunlight and pounding headache until her features sharpened into focus, and relief moved sluggishly through his chest when he confirmed that no, he had not apparently stumbled home with some random freckled stranger last night.

Dean dragged a hand down his face with a wince, immediately regretting it when the movement seemed to wake every nerve ending in his skull at once. His mouth tasted like cigarettes and bad decisions, dry enough that his tongue practically stuck to the roof of it, and somewhere on his chest, there was a tacky patch of something that smelled aggressively like tequila when he shifted beneath the sheets. He frowned down at himself blearily, noticing for the first time that he wasn’t wearing a shirt.

“The hell did we do?” he muttered hoarsely to nobody in particular, voice roughened by sleep and liquor as he glanced back toward Bunny.

She didn’t stir beyond the slow rise and fall of her breathing, still dead to the world in the way only true exhaustion allowed, one hand tucked loosely beneath her cheek beneath the pillow. Dean watched her for a second longer than necessary, brow furrowing slightly as he tried to pull anything useful out of the disconnected static rattling around in his head. He remembered drinking with her. Definitely. Remembered her laughing hard enough to lean into his shoulder at one point while Sam looked on like he regretted every life choice that had led him there. After that, though? Nothing solid. Just flashes. Neon. Laughter.

Carefully, like sudden movement might actually kill him, Dean reached over and let his hand settle against her side beneath the sheets, palm warm against bare skin. His thumb brushed once over her hip before he gave it a gentle squeeze, earning himself a quiet groan from somewhere deep in her chest.

“Hey,” he rasped. “Rise and shine, sweetheart. Time to wake up.”

She responded with a miserable little groan muffled halfway into the pillow, curling tighter beneath the blankets instead of opening her eyes. “Hungover,” she mumbled thickly, accent roughened by sleep and dehydration, the word dragged out like a personal offense.

Dean huffed something that might’ve been a laugh if his head didn’t feel moments away from splitting open entirely. “Yeah, no kidding.” He swallowed against another wave of nausea before rubbing tiredly at his jaw. “C’mon, angel, I need you conscious. We gotta figure out where the hell we are.”

For a moment, there was no response besides the quiet hum of the suite around them and the distant, muted pulse of Vegas far below the windows, and Dean assumed she’d either fallen immediately back asleep or was still trying to claw her way back toward consciousness through the same pounding haze currently flattening him. Then Bunny finally cracked an eye open beneath the spill of dark hair across her face, gaze unfocused as it drifted slowly around the unfamiliar room.

Silence stretched for exactly long enough that Dean knew the realization had hit her, too. Then, very quietly and very miserably, “…what the fuck?”

Dean closed his eyes briefly and hummed his exhausted agreement, the sound low and gravelly in the back of his throat as another pulse of pain moved behind his eyes hard enough to make his stomach twist. “Yeah,” he muttered after a second, dragging the heel of his palm over his forehead like he could physically smooth the hangover out of his skull. “That’s kinda where I’m at too.”

For a moment, neither of them moved beyond breathing through the misery of existence itself, sunlight pouring lazily across the bed in warm gold bands while somewhere far below them, Vegas carried on completely unaware that Dean currently felt moments away from death. The room hummed softly around them with the quiet luxury of expensive air conditioning and distant city noise muted by glass thick enough to survive a nuclear blast, and Dean had just enough time to think that he should probably attempt standing at some point before Bunny suddenly shifted beside him with a groan.

Still half-buried beneath the blankets, she reached blindly toward the bedside table without lifting her head properly off the pillow, one arm stretching out across the mattress while her eyes remained mostly shut against the light. Her hand slapped uselessly against the polished wood once. Twice. Fingers fumbling clumsily over what sounded like a lamp base before stretching just a little too far.

Bunny vanished off the side of the bed with a startled noise somewhere between a groan and a curse, followed immediately by a heavy thump against the carpet that sounded painful enough to make Dean wince in sympathy.

“Jesus,” he rasped, instinctively trying to push himself further upright before the room lurched violently sideways around him. A brutal wave of nausea crashed into him so hard he had to stop immediately, leaning heavily back against his elbows. Black spots burst briefly across his vision.

For several long seconds, he could only breathe carefully through clenched teeth while the world steadied itself again, sunlight stabbing behind his eyes with every heartbeat. Somewhere on the floor beside the bed, Bunny made a soft, pained little noise into the carpet.

Dean swallowed thickly. “You alive down there?” he croaked eventually, voice shredded thin from dehydration and sleep. He dragged a hand slowly down his face again, feeling the scratch of stubble against his palm before peering blearily over the edge of the mattress. “Baby?”

There was a pause. Then, from somewhere below him and several feet closer to the center of the earth: “…it’s cold on the floor.” One of her feet remained hooked loosely in the blankets on the bed, toes peeking out from the duvet like the world’s saddest crime scene evidence.

He blinked slowly. “Is that good or bad?”

Another long silence followed, heavy with the kind of deep spiritual exhaustion that only catastrophic hangovers could produce. Dean could practically hear her trying to process the question through whatever remained of her brain function. “I honestly don’t know,” she admitted miserably, voice muffled by the carpet. “I don’t think I’ve ever been this hungover in my life.”

Dean blew out a slow breath through his nose, somewhere between a laugh and a groan himself. “Yeah,” he muttered, staring up at the ceiling again. “Join the club.”

The room settled back into quiet around them after that, soft and strange and deeply surreal in the morning light. Dean could hear Bunny shifting sluggishly on the floor beside the bed, the rustle of sheets and fabric dragging against carpet while she presumably attempted the impossible task of reassembling herself into a functioning human being. His head still felt like somebody had jammed an ice pick through one temple and out the other, and every time he moved too quickly, his stomach threatened mutiny.

Bunny’s hand appeared slowly over the side of the mattress, fingers blindly patting around like she was searching for buried treasure. Dean watched with vague fascination as she grabbed hold of a piece of discarded fabric and tugged it down onto herself. A dress shirt, white and wrinkled.

Dean squinted at it for a second through the haze in his vision, sluggishly trying to determine whether it belonged to him. It might have. Honestly, at the moment, he could barely remember his own middle name, let alone inventory his clothing choices from the night before.

“What,” she asked after a moment, voice still muffled somewhere below the mattress level, “the hell did we do last night?”

Dean let his head fall back against the pillows with another groan, staring up at the cream-colored ceiling overhead while he tried once again to force his memories into something coherent. Nothing useful surfaced. Just disconnected flashes and sensations rattling around loose in his skull like broken glass.

“I was kinda hoping you’d know,” he admitted. “Pretty sure my brain dissolved somewhere around tequila number twelve.”

“Mm.” Bunny was quiet for a second, and he could practically picture the frown pulling at her mouth while she tried to sort through the same fog. “Last thing I properly remember is the three of us playing poker with some man named Rick. Or Bob. Gary, maybe. Something terribly American.”

Despite himself, Dean snorted quietly. The movement immediately punished him with another sharp spike of pain behind his eyes. “God.” He pressed his fingers against his eyes again before squinting down toward the floor. “Wait, poker?”

“Yes, darling.”

“I don’t even remember poker.”

Another beat of silence passed before Dean’s brow furrowed more deeply into confusion. Slowly, painfully, he lifted his head just enough to glance around the enormous suite again, finally noticing for the first time what was missing. No giant moose-shaped silhouette asleep in an armchair. No Sam muttering judgmental comments about hydration from across the room.

Dean frowned. “…where the hell is Sam?”

From somewhere down on the floor beside the bed, Bunny made a soft humming noise that sounded suspiciously close to a prayer for death. “Hopefully, wherever he is, he’s faring better than we are,” she mumbled after a second. There was a pause while she seemed to reconsider the state of her own body with growing despair. “Because at present, it feels rather like I’ve been flattened beneath a tequila truck,” she added weakly.

Dean grunted his agreement low in his throat, though the movement immediately punished him for existing. Carefully, with all the caution of a man attempting to dismantle a bomb using only instinct and spite, he forced himself to sit up fully against the headboard. The second he moved upright, pain bloomed behind his eyes so violently it nearly knocked him back down again. Sunlight crashed into him from the wall of windows in hot golden sheets, too bright and too clean and entirely too enthusiastic for what his body was currently enduring, and Dean squinted hard against it.

“Jesus,” he muttered hoarsely beneath his breath. His stomach rolled again, slower this time but no less threatening, and he swallowed hard against it before dragging his gaze sluggishly around the suite. “If I didn’t know what getting mickeyed felt like, I’d swear somebody slipped us something,” he said after a moment, words slow and roughened by dehydration.

The thought lingered unpleasantly in the air between them.

Normally, Dean trusted his tolerance more than he trusted most people. He knew exactly how much liquor it took to get him drunk, exactly how far he could push himself before things started going blurry around the edges, and while the occasional blackout wasn’t impossible, this level of complete memory annihilation felt wrong somehow. Hollowed out. Like entire sections of the night had simply been scooped clean from his skull with a spoon.

No response came from the floor beside the bed.

Dean’s brow pinched slightly as he glanced down toward the side of the mattress again. “You alive down there?”

For a second, there was only the distant muted pulse of traffic far below the windows and the steady hum of expensive air conditioning drifting through the suite. Then Bunny finally spoke in the flat, fragile tone of somebody hanging onto consciousness through sheer force of will alone.

“I’m doing a tremendous amount of positive thinking at the moment,” she informed him weakly, “because I would really rather not vomit on this incredibly expensive carpet.”

The image hit Dean hard enough that a laugh escaped him before he could stop it. The sound came out as a rough huff that immediately made his skull throb hard enough to blur his vision again, and he hissed sharply through his teeth while pressing both hands against his forehead. “Ow,” he groaned.

Despite the pounding misery trying to cave his head in from the inside, Dean forced himself to look around the suite properly for the first time. The room remained aggressively luxurious from every possible angle, all warm cream-colored walls and dark polished wood glowing amber beneath the morning sunlight pouring through the windows.

His gaze dragged slowly across the mess, sluggishly piecing together fragments of evidence through the haze in his head. A pair of Bunny’s heels lay abandoned near the couch beside one of his socks. There was a dark skirt crumpled near the windows, and farther away, he spotted his jeans lying limp like they’d given up on holding shape.

Something lacy caught his attention, pale green fabric dangling precariously from one of the carved posts of the headboard. Dean stared at Bunny’s underwear for a long second through the fog in his vision before reaching over with all the sluggish dignity of a man operating at approximately three percent functionality. He hooked the fabric carefully with two fingers and tugged it free, the motion sending another sharp pulse through his temples.

“Found these,” he muttered, tossing them vaguely toward the floor beside the bed.

“…thank you,” Bunny said with genuine feeling, like he’d just handed her life-saving medical supplies instead of underwear.

Dean hummed softly through his nose, gentler this time so his brain wouldn’t rupture, before leaning over enough to pat the foot still tangled stubbornly in the blankets near him. Her toes twitched beneath his hand in response.

After several long seconds spent mentally preparing himself for war, Dean pushed himself off the bed. The moment his feet hit the floor, the world tilted violently sideways.

“Fuck,” he hissed, catching himself hard against the nearest wall while nausea surged through him so aggressively he thought for one terrible second that he might die standing up. His stomach rolled warningly beneath his ribs, every pulse behind his eyes sharp and molten, and Dean stood there half bent over with one palm flattened against the wallpaper while he concentrated very hard on not throwing up in what was probably a suite worth more per night than his car.

From the floor, Bunny lifted her head slightly. “How are you even standing right now?” she asked weakly, genuine awe threaded through the exhaustion in her voice.

Dean swallowed hard, breathing slowly through his nose before risking movement again. “Pretty sure I’m about thirty seconds away from throwing up in a decorative plant, sweetheart, so let’s not start calling miracles in just yet.”

That earned him a quiet, miserable little laugh from somewhere near the carpet.

Taking another steadying breath, Dean shuffled cautiously forward through the suite with all the dignity of an eighty-year-old man recovering from surgery, one hand dragging along furniture and walls whenever the room swayed too sharply beneath him. His boxers had ended up across the room, and he grabbed them with a tired grunt before stepping into them one leg at a time while leaning heavily against the wall for balance.

Everything hurt.

Not injured, exactly, just… catastrophically overindulged. His body felt dense and overheated and vaguely poisoned from the inside out, every movement delayed half a second behind his thoughts while his brain attempted to catch up with reality through layers of cotton and tequila fumes.

A few feet away, he found his jeans crumpled beside one of the armchairs and hauled them on with considerably more effort than pants should’ve reasonably required. By the time he managed to get them over his hips, he was breathing hard enough to make himself annoyed about it, and he left both the button and belt undone. Too much effort.

Dean scrubbed both hands slowly over his face before dragging them back through his hair, trying unsuccessfully to force some clarity into his head as he glanced around the suite again. It looked even stranger standing up.

Too nice, too unreal. After the Halcyon, waking up somewhere luxurious and unfamiliar felt a little too close to another cosmic joke for comfort.

Dean exhaled slowly through his nose and turned back toward the bed just in time to finally get a proper look at Bunny sprawled on the floor beside it.

She’d apparently managed to tug the dress shirt on at some point during his slow migration across the room, though “on” was generous considering it was only halfway buttoned and noticeably crooked, one side hanging lower than the other while the collar slipped loose against her throat. Dark hair spread wildly around her across the carpet in tangled waves, her face flushed pink from dehydration and alcohol and sleep, and she looked so thoroughly wrecked that Dean couldn’t help the chuckle that escaped him.

“Rough night, princess?” he asked, voice still gravelly around the edges.

Bunny glared up at him with all the fury a severely hungover woman could muster. “Oh, piss off,” she muttered, trying to lever herself upward onto her elbows.

She only made it halfway before suddenly freezing.

The movement stopped so abruptly that Dean’s faint amusement faded almost immediately. Bunny’s eyes had locked onto something near his shoulder with sharp, dawning focus, cutting clean through the haze of exhaustion on her face.

She lifted one hand and pointed weakly toward his arm. “Tattoo,” she said.

Dean blinked at her for a second, the word taking its sweet time crossing the ruined wasteland of his brain before it actually landed. “Tattoo?” he repeated, because apparently at some point in the last twelve hours his life had become the kind of joke that required follow-up questions.

Bunny didn’t answer beyond pointing again, her face still half slack with hangover misery and half sharpened by dawning, terrible fascination. Dean looked down at his right arm first, squinting at bare skin and muscle and the old familiar geography of scars he knew well enough not to register unless something new interrupted it. Nothing. He frowned harder, then turned his head toward his left, already annoyed by the effort of basic investigation. “What the hell are you—”

Then he shifted, the morning light catching the inside of his left arm at a different angle, and Dean finally saw it. For a second, everything in him went very still.

There, inked into the skin of his inner bicep, a little way below the brutal, pink brand Castiel’s hand had burned into his shoulder, was a rabbit. Not a cartoon exactly, not some drunken piece of flash picked off a wall because it had looked funny after too many shots, but a clean little linework thing done with more care than a decision like that deserved. Long ears, small curved back, the shape delicate without being fussy, dark ink sitting stark against his skin like it had always been waiting there beneath the surface and had only just decided to show itself.

Dean stared at it. His brain, traitorous and useless as it had been all morning, coughed up a fragment then, sharp and sudden enough to make his stomach drop for an entirely different reason.

A bunny for my Bunny.

His own voice. Slurred around the edges, sure, warm with liquor and laughter, but unmistakably his. The words surfaced without context attached to them, nothing before or after, just that one humiliating little declaration echoing up out of the blacked-out pit of last night like evidence at a crime scene.

Dean closed his eyes briefly. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered.

A strangled little sound came from Bunny. When he looked down, she had clapped a hand over her mouth, eyes bright despite the flush of misery still clinging to her face, laughter shaking silently through her before it finally broke loose in a startled, delighted burst that made her wince and smile at the same time. She looked absolutely wrecked on the floor in that crooked dress shirt, hair everywhere, cheeks pink, eyes glassy from the hangover, and somehow she was still grinning up at him like he’d just presented her with the funniest, most impossible thing she had ever seen.

Dean should have been horrified.

He had never thought of himself as the kind of guy who got a tattoo for a woman. That was the kind of dumbass, soft-brained move he would’ve mercilessly mocked if Sam had done it, the kind of thing he’d file away for future blackmail and bring up at every possible opportunity until the end of time. And yet there it was, inked into his skin beneath the mark of an angel, because apparently, blackout Dean had taken one look at romantic tension, trauma, and tequila, and decided subtlety was for cowards.

Still, it wasn’t just any woman he’d gotten a tattoo for. That was the problem, wasn’t it?

Dean looked at the rabbit again, then back down at Bunny, and something helplessly crooked tugged at one corner of his mouth despite the pounding in his head. “Could be worse,” he said, voice rough but threaded with reluctant amusement. “Could’ve gotten a Playboy Bunny to match the one on your ass.”

Bunny’s laughter stumbled into another pained groan as she lowered her hand from her mouth, still smiling in a way that made the whole room feel slightly less hostile. “Honestly,” she murmured, blinking up at him through the mess of her hair, “I might have liked that more.”

Dean huffed softly, careful not to let it become a full laugh this time, then leaned down with one hand braced against the bed and offered her the other. “C’mon,” he said. “Up you go.”

Bunny stared at his hand for a second like it belonged to a man asking her to scale Everest, then sighed with the grim resignation of somebody accepting that the floor could not, in fact, be her final resting place. She took hold of him, fingers warm and slightly unsteady in his, and Dean hauled her upright slowly enough that neither of them hurt from the effort. Even so, the moment she got her feet beneath her, she swayed hard into him, one hand catching clumsily at his forearm while her face pinched with sudden nausea.

Dean’s other hand moved to her waist without thought, steadying her before she could fold sideways into the nightstand. “Easy, angel,” he murmured, grip firm over the loose fabric of the shirt. “I gotcha.”

For a moment, they just stood there in the middle of the suite, half-dressed, hungover, and held together mostly by bad choices and muscle memory. Bunny’s shoulder brushed his bare chest; the shirt she’d stolen hung crooked down one thigh, buttons mismatched, collar slipping open, and Dean became suddenly, inconveniently aware of the new ink on his arm, of the softness of her waist beneath his hand, of the way her fingers lingered against him even after she’d stopped swaying.

Then she made a small, wounded sound and pressed the heels of both hands hard against her eyes.

Dean let the moment go before it could become something with teeth. “Getting a tattoo is probably not the dumbest thing I’ve ever done for a woman,” he said, glancing down at his arm again. “But it’s definitely up there.”

Bunny groaned like the sentence had personally injured her. “I am far too hungover to contemplate what the dumbest thing you’ve ever done for a woman might be,” she said, words precise despite the rough scrape of her voice, “so I’m going to let that slide for now, darling.”

“Real generous of you, sweetheart.”

Her hands dropped slowly from her face, and her gaze drifted around the suite again, taking in the scattered clothes, the enormous bed, the ruined evidence of whatever the hell they had done the night before, and the city glittering obscenely beyond the windows. The smile faded from her mouth by degrees, confusion settling back in beneath the hangover as she looked toward the floor-to-ceiling glass and then the strange, expensive furniture around them.

“Dean,” she said quietly, “where the hell are we?”

“Still working on that,” Dean admitted. He looked around the room once more, at the discarded clothes and massive windows and polished luxury surrounding them, before rubbing a tired hand over his jaw.

“But first,” he muttered, “we need clothes and coffee before we continue this little investigation.”

Bunny hummed her agreement, though the sound came out thin and miserable, one hand still pressed against her temple like she was physically holding her skull together through force of will alone. “Clothes,” she echoed faintly. “Coffee. Yes. God, I want coffee.”

Dean huffed softly through his nose, watching as she released his arm only after testing her balance with the careful suspicion of someone negotiating with gravity. She stood for a moment in the middle of the ruined suite, bare-legged and disheveled in the crooked white shirt, gaze moving slowly across the scattered evidence of the night before until it settled on the dark skirt lying crumpled near the windows.

Even in her current state, Bunny managed to move with a stubborn sort of dignity, though every step looked like it required negotiation between her body and whatever remained of her patience. She padded carefully across the carpet, one hand trailing briefly over the back of the couch for balance, then stopped in front of the skirt and drew in a slow, deliberate breath like bending down had become a task worthy of military planning.

Dean should’ve been looking for his boots. Or his shirt. Or a phone. Or Sam. Honestly, there were about a dozen practical things he could have been doing that did not involve watching Bunny bend over in the middle of an obscenely expensive hotel suite while wearing nothing but a half-buttoned dress shirt and a pair of underwear he was already thinking about pulling off with his teeth. But he was only human.

The shirt rode up as she bent, loose cotton sliding higher over the backs of her thighs, and Dean’s gaze dropped without even a scrap of shame attached to it. It was familiar territory, after all. He’d had his hands there enough times by now that pretend modesty would’ve just been insulting to everyone involved. His mouth had already started to pull into something faintly appreciative despite the pounding in his skull when his attention snagged abruptly on something new just above the curve of her ass, dark ink stark against pale skin where there absolutely had not been dark ink before.

For a second, Dean just stared.

Then a laugh escaped him, stilted and disbelieving enough that it sounded like it had been punched out of his chest.

Bunny froze halfway through picking up her skirt. “What?” she asked groggily, straightening with visible caution and clutching the fabric against herself while she turned to squint at him. Her expression was immediately suspicious, which Dean probably deserved on principle.

Dean opened his mouth, closed it again, and stared at her for another second as the situation unfolded in his brain with such brutal, perfect absurdity that not even the hangover could dull it. “Well,” he said slowly, voice already tilting toward amusement despite himself, “looks like I’m not the only one who made a lifelong commitment to ink last night.”

Bunny’s eyes narrowed. “What does that mean?”

Dean bit the inside of his cheek, trying and failing not to grin. “Means you might wanna check your back, sweetheart.”

The suspicion on her face deepened into genuine alarm. “Oh, no,” she said, very softly. “No. Absolutely not.”

He nodded toward the mirror set into the wall near the open archway of the suite. “See for yourself.”

Bunny looked at him for one long, deeply mistrustful second before turning with the slow dread of a woman approaching her own execution. She made her way across the room unsteadily, skirt still clutched in one hand, and stopped in front of the mirror. For a moment, she simply stared at her reflection, pale and messy and hollow-eyed beneath the brutal honesty of morning light, then turned slightly and lifted the back of the shirt with the kind of hesitation usually reserved for removing bandages.

Her gasp was immediate. Sharp. Horrified. Completely awake in a way nothing else had managed to make her all morning.

Dean, naturally, crossed the room to investigate with considerably more enthusiasm than he’d had for literally anything since waking up. There, nestled low on her back in delicate black cursive, just above the curve of her hips, were his initials. D.M.W.

Not huge. Not garish. The lettering was clean and elegant, curling slightly at the edges in a way that somehow suited her even though it was, technically speaking, a tramp stamp of his name. The skin around it was faintly red, and Dean had to press his lips together for about half a second before the grin won completely.

Bunny stared at the reflection like it had personally betrayed her. “There is no bloody way,” she said, voice faint with horror. “No. I did not.”

Dean leaned a shoulder against the wall beside the mirror, thoroughly delighted even though his own body was still threatening collapse. “Oh, you did.” He reached out and lifted the hem of the shirt higher, smug. “Unless there’s another D.M.W. you’re running around Vegas with, princess, that’s definitely me.”

Bunny twisted a little farther, trying to see the tattoo more clearly in the mirror, and her expression went through several stages of grief in the space of about three seconds. Disbelief, outrage, mortification, and then, most dangerously, the twitching edge of a smile she was very clearly trying to murder before he could see it.

Dean saw it anyway. “Oh, this is good,” he murmured, grinning wide enough that his face hurt. “This is really good.”

“Don’t.”

“You got my initials tattooed on your back, princess.”

“I said don’t.”

“Lower back, too.” Dean made a soft clicking sound with his tongue, absolutely incapable of stopping himself. “Classy.”

Bunny dropped the shirt back down like that might somehow erase the evidence from existence and turned toward him with all the wounded dignity she could manage while severely hungover and wearing his crooked dress shirt. “Piss off. And you know this was not a decision I would ever make sober.”

Dean grinned, still leaning there with his arms loosely crossed, new rabbit tattoo tucked against his bicep, and his jeans hanging open like he had any room to judge anyone. “Still, baby. My initials, right above your ass?” He shook his head with exaggerated solemnity. “That’s a lot.”

She shoved him lightly in the chest, which probably would’ve been more intimidating if the effort didn’t make her immediately wince and grab his arm for balance afterward. “You have a rabbit on your arm.”

“Yes, I do.” He nodded toward her lower back with unbearable satisfaction. “Mine’s symbolic. Yours is basically a property label.”

Bunny made a scandalized noise. “Oi, careful,” she said, but the smile finally broke through despite her best efforts, small and helpless at the corner of her mouth. “You are unbearable.”

“Apparently not,” Dean said, unable to resist. “You branded yourself with my initials because you’re so into me.”

Dean glanced down at the tattoo again, half-hidden now beneath the hem of the shirt, and felt his grin shift into something softer before he could quite stop it. There was something absurdly intimate about it, something ridiculous and stupid and permanent in a way that should’ve made him bolt emotionally for the nearest exit. But instead, standing there in the bright morning light with his head pounding and her name effectively inked into his own skin in the shape of a rabbit, all he could really think was that they had somehow spent the night making choices sober versions of themselves were too chickenshit to admit they wanted.

That thought was dangerous as hell, so Dean did what Dean did best and buried it under a joke.

“Gotta say,” he said, pushing off the wall with a lazy little wince, “that’s officially my third favorite drunk decision you’ve ever made.”

“Third?” Bunny repeated, suspicion sharpening through the hangover haze as she watched him, her eyes narrowing with the kind of wary focus that said she already knew whatever came out of his mouth next was going to be insufferable.

Dean, naturally, took that as encouragement. He lifted one hand and began counting lazily on his fingers as he followed her toward the scattered wreckage of their clothes, still grinning with the kind of smugness that would’ve gotten him smacked even on a completely sober morning. “Third place,” he said, voice rough and amused, “goes to the Playboy tattoo on your ass, obviously. Classic. Strong branding.”

Bunny’s mouth opened, probably to tell him exactly where he could shove his commentary, but Dean kept going before she could get there. “Second place is the fact that you’re apparently into me enough to get my initials tattooed above it, which is so much more embarrassing than anything I’ve ever done in my entire life.”

Bunny stared at him for a long second, cheeks still faintly pink from alcohol and mortification, the dark skirt gathered in her hands, while she looked like she was actively considering whether murder was worth the nausea. “I feel as if I’m going to regret this, but what’s the first?” she asked at last, tone prim in a way that would’ve sounded dangerous if she weren’t standing barefoot in a crooked dress shirt.

Dean’s grin turned slow and wicked despite the pounding in his head, because apparently no amount of tequila, memory loss, or possible supernatural interference could stop him from being an asshole when handed an opening that good. “First place is still you and me in the rain outside that bar,” he said, letting his gaze flick over her just enough to make the point land.

Bunny’s eyes rolled so hard it was honestly a miracle she didn’t pass out from the additional strain, and she shoved him in the chest again with the hand not clutching her skirt, though the impact was weaker than she probably intended and mostly made her sway. Dean caught her automatically by the elbow before she could stumble, smug as hell and entirely too pleased with himself, which only made her expression flatten further. She pulled free after a second with what dignity she could salvage and muttered, “For the record, this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done for a man. By miles, love. Miles.”

“Still did it,” Dean pointed out, because he had apparently woken up and chosen death by Englishwoman.

Bunny stepped into her skirt with slow, deliberate concentration, one hand braced on the back of the couch while she navigated fabric, balance, and the betrayal of her own inner ear. The motion should not have been as funny as it was, but Dean watched her fight her way into the thing like she was wrestling with a live animal, her mouth pressed into a hard line while the crooked dress shirt slid off one shoulder and her hair fell in tangled waves around her face. Even miserable, even furious with him, even tattooed with his initials in a place he knew he was going to think about for the rest of his life, she still looked like herself in the way that hit him inconveniently low in the chest, all sharp edges and stubborn grace and murder in her eyes.

“Keep smirking,” she said without looking at him, voice still roughened by sleep but regaining some of its usual bite, “and I’ll make you tattoo my name across your bloody forehead.”

Dean should’ve shut up. He knew that. He could feel the sensible response somewhere in the back of his skull, bound and gagged beneath several layers of hangover and testosterone, begging him to stop making things worse. Instead, he hooked his thumbs loosely into the open waistband of his jeans, tilted his head, and said, “I’d do it.”

Bunny froze halfway through tugging the skirt up over her hips and looked at him.

Dean’s grin softened around the edges before he could stop it, but the smugness stayed because it was safer that way, easier to wear than whatever else had tried to move across his face. “Happily,” he added, voice low and rough. “Because I wouldn’t be the one who got the other person’s name tattooed on them first.”

Bunny looked at him with something unreadable flickering beneath the exhaustion, something that might have been amusement if it hadn’t been standing so close to embarrassment and something softer neither of them were awake enough to touch. Then she grabbed the nearest shirt from the floor and hurled it directly at his face. It hit him harder than strictly necessary.

Dean caught it late, laughing under his breath as fabric slid down over his eyes and nose, the sound immediately making him wince again. “Ouch, sweetheart.”

“Put your clothes on,” Bunny told him, turning away with a dramatic dignity slightly undermined by the fact that she had to brace one hand against the couch again. “We are finding your brother, locating coffee, and pretending this conversation never happened until I have enough caffeine in my bloodstream to survive it.”

“So bossy,” he muttered, shoving his arms through the sleeves of the Henley with a wince when the movement pulled faintly at the fresh tattoo on his bicep. “Find Sam, find coffee, pretend we didn’t both wake up looking like a cautionary tale. Solid plan.”

Bunny moved toward the heavy double doors at the far end of the bedroom with the grim determination of a woman marching toward either salvation or a firing squad. Dean got his jeans buttoned on the second try, abandoned the belt for the moment because fine motor skills were apparently for people who hadn’t tried to outdrink the city of Las Vegas, and scrubbed a hand back through his hair as Bunny wrapped both hands around one brass handle and pulled.

The door swung open on silent hinges, and Bunny stopped dead in the threshold.

Dean nearly walked into her back. “What?” he muttered, squinting past her shoulder.

The bedroom was nice. Too nice, sure, all polished wood and sunlight and sheets that probably cost more than most weapons in the trunk, but it had still been a bedroom. This, however, was something else entirely. The room beyond stretched wide and open beneath ceilings tall enough to make Dean’s neck ache just looking up at them, all warm marble floors softened by enormous rugs, curved couches sunken into a conversation pit near the center of the room, and a crystal chandelier hanging overhead.

There was a baby grand piano sitting near one bank of windows, looking absurdly glossy and untouched, a full bar gleamed along the far wall with rows of bottles arranged like some shrine to bad decisions, and several other doors led off into who the hell knew where, because apparently the suite had enough square footage to require a map.

For one brief, horrible second, Dean thought again of the Halcyon. Of pretty rooms that didn’t lead where they should. Of halls rearranging themselves while something old and amused watched from behind the wallpaper. His stomach tightened beneath the nausea, instinct sharpening despite the hangover, and his gaze swept the room automatically for exits, threats, anything that didn’t belong.

Then Wallace lifted his big scarred head from one of the couches, scarred muzzle planted happily over an enormous bone that looked roughly the size of a human femur. His pink collar sat slightly crooked around his neck, one ear tipped back lazily as he regarded them with mild interest, tail giving exactly one thump against the expensive upholstery before he returned to gnawing with single-minded satisfaction.

“The hell,” Dean said, because it seemed to be the only phrase his brain still had available.

Somewhere near the far side of the room, Sam looked up from a white-clothed breakfast table with a fork in his hand and an expression so bright, rested, and offensively alive that Dean felt an immediate, violent urge to throw something at him.

Sam was sitting there like a man who had not, in fact, been dragged through the business end of a tequila truck the night before. His hair was damp, like he’d already showered. His shirt was clean. There was a plate of eggs and toast in front of him, coffee beside it, and across from him stood a neatly dressed man in a dark suit who looked like he belonged to the suite in a way none of them ever would.

“Well, good morning,” Sam said cheerfully, lifting his coffee like a toast. His eyes flicked over both of them, lingering for one devastating second on Dean’s rumpled shirt and Bunny’s violently hungover expression, and his grin widened. “How was the rest of your night?”

For several seconds, nobody moved. Bunny stood rigid in the doorway wearing a wrinkled dress shirt tucked badly into her skirt, hair still wild around her flushed face, one hand braced against the frame like the only thing keeping her from collapsing was pure spite. Dean stood half a step behind her, belt still undone, jaw set, head pounding.

Sam, the smug son of a bitch, took a bite of toast.

The man in the suit, either professionally oblivious or too well-trained to react to any of it, stepped forward with a small, polite inclination of his head. His smile was courteous, discreet, and absolutely devastating.

“Good morning, Mr. and Mrs. Winchester.” Dean felt Bunny freeze beside him so completely that he could practically hear her brain stop functioning.

The man continued smoothly. “I took the liberty of having the chef prepare your preferred breakfasts. Mr. Winchester, I believe you requested the steak and eggs with extra bacon. Mrs. Winchester, the eggs Benedict with roasted tomatoes and black coffee.” His smile warmed by exactly one professional degree. “I also had my personal hangover cure brought up for both of you. After such a long evening, I thought you might be feeling the effects this morning.”

For several seconds, Bunny only stared at him.

Not at breakfast. Not at the hangover cure. Not even at Sam, who still sat there with his coffee and his smug little morning-after expression like he’d been waiting all morning for the floor to drop out from under them. Bunny stared directly at the man in the suit, her face pale beneath the flush of alcohol, one hand still braced against the doorframe as her mind caught on the same thing Dean’s had.

“Who the hell are you?” Bunny asked, voice low and careful in a way that was somehow more dangerous than if she’d snapped.

The man’s polished smile did not falter. “Arthur, ma’am,” he said with another small inclination of his head. “Your personal butler for the duration of your stay here at the Lucky 29. It has been my pleasure to assist you and your party, particularly after such a memorable evening. And may I say, congratulations once again.”

The word landed in the room with an awful little weight. Congratulations.

Dean’s brain caught on it the way fabric caught on a nail, snagging hard before tearing loose into a dozen different terrible directions. Beside him, Bunny went even more still, her hand tightening around the edge of the doorframe until her knuckles looked pale against the brass-warmed wood. Dean could practically feel the same calculation moving through her, slow and silent and full of alarm.

Arthur knew his name. Not Dean Smith. Not Dean Hagar. Not the kind of half-assed alias he could usually pull from a classic rock cassette and a cheap smile. Winchester. The real one. The name that lived on wanted posters, police databases, and obituaries that hadn’t stuck. The name that got people looking too closely if they heard it in the wrong places.

Dean’s gaze flicked toward Sam.

Sam, infuriatingly, looked perfectly comfortable with all of this, like personal butlers and breakfast tables and Bunny being called Mrs. Winchester were just standard Vegas-trip fallout. He took another slow sip of coffee while Dean stared at him hard enough to peel paint.

Before Dean could speak, Arthur stepped toward Bunny with practiced discretion, reaching into the inside pocket of his jacket. “I kept this safe for you as requested, Mrs. Winchester. I also took the liberty of having it cleaned at the jeweler’s this morning. I hope this was acceptable.”He held out a ring.

Dean’s stomach dropped so abruptly that the nausea vanished beneath it. It wasn’t big. It wasn’t flashy. Just a silver band with a diamond catching the morning light in one brief, sharp glint. Simple. Pretty. Exactly the sort of ring Bunny would’ve picked if she’d ever let herself admit she wanted one.

A wedding ring.

The words rattled in Dean’s head with the slow, brutal force of a car crash. Arthur had called them Mr. and Mrs. Winchester. They’d woken up naked in an expensive Vegas suite. Dean had a rabbit tattooed on his arm. Bunny had his initials inked low on her back. There was a ring being handed to her by a butler who knew them by name.

Did they get fucking married?

Bunny stared at the ring for a long moment, expression gone strangely blank around the edges, before she finally reached out and took it from Arthur’s open palm. “Thank you,” she said, faint and automatic, though she didn’t put it on.

Instead, her eyes dropped immediately to Dean’s hands. Dean followed her gaze. The ring he’d worn for years on his right hand was no longer on his right hand. It sat squarely on his left ring finger, familiar silver suddenly unfamiliar in placement, heavy as a confession. Dean stared at it, his pulse thudding once, hard, in his throat.

It was just metal. That was the stupid thing. The same ring he’d worn for years without thinking about it, silver rubbed dull at the edges, scratched in places from hunts and engines and a life spent putting his hands where most people had the good sense not to. It had sat on his right hand through blood, bar fights, grave digging, salt lines, motel mornings, and more close calls than he could count. It had been familiar enough to vanish into him, another piece of background noise in the wreckage of Dean Winchester.

Now it sat on his left ring finger, and the whole damn thing felt rewritten.

His throat worked once, dry and tight, while his brain tried to hold too many things at the same time. The room. The tattoos. Arthur saying Mrs. Winchester like that was something ordinary and settled. Bunny standing beside him with her ring held loose in her palm instead of on her finger. Sam was too quiet now; the smugness finally dimmed beneath whatever he saw on Dean’s face.

Things had just started to feel normal between them again, or as normal as anything got for people like them.

After the Halcyon, after that gilded nightmare had chewed time out of their lives and spit them back onto the road wrong-footed and bruised in places nobody else could see, after Dean had broken down in the hospital with Alastair’s blood still metaphorically under his nails and Bunny had looked at him like she was trying to hold him together with nothing but her hands and sheer stubbornness, after Zachariah had shoved them all into that glossy little corporate dollhouse and made them live lives that felt close enough to real to hurt when they were ripped away again. After all of that, they had almost made it back to something that looked like Dean and Bunny.

Not fixed. Not clean. Hell, not even particularly functional, but theirs.

They’d been making weird jokes again. Sharing motel-room silences without them turning stale. Staying up too late because sleep felt like a bad idea, and talking felt easier when the lights were low, and Sam was finally out cold in the other bed or the other room. Eating fries off the same greasy paper tray. Letting their hands brush without either of them flinching away from the fact of it. Trying, in that dumb, stubborn way hunters tried, to pretend the world wasn’t ending quite so loudly because for five goddamn minutes they still had each other.

That was probably why they’d both jumped at it when Sam mentioned Vegas.

The yearly Winchester Vegas trip. Like that was still a thing they got to have. Like there were still traditions left untouched by angels and demons and apocalypse crap. Dean hadn’t even cared that Bunny had immediately looked at him like she knew every stupid casino story he’d ever half-told her was about to come back to life in the worst possible way. He’d wanted it anyway. Neon, cheap whiskey, too much noise, Sam pretending he wasn’t having fun while absolutely having fun, Bunny laughing under casino lights with smoke curling between her fingers.

Normal. He’d wanted normal so badly he’d mistaken it for safe. And instead, they’d gotten this.

A strange luxury suite high above the Strip. A hangover so vicious it felt engineered by an angry god. Fresh ink on his arm. A butler handing over her wedding ring like this was all part of the service package. His own ring moved to the finger people looked at when they wanted to know who belonged to who, what promises had been made, what life somebody had chosen.

Dean wanted to marry her, sure. Of course he did.

That was the worst part, wasn’t it? Not that it was some impossible, foreign idea. Not that the ring felt like a joke or another goddamn hallucination cooked up by Heaven to see how far they could push him before he broke something important. No, the worst part was that some quiet, buried part of him looked at Bunny standing beside him with that little silver ring in her palm and thought, with a terrible aching clarity, yeah. Yeah, that could be good.

It wasn’t a thought he’d ever let surface properly before Sandover. Before he was Dean Smith in a pressed shirt and a clean office, selling his soul one meeting at a time without knowing he’d already done the real version once. Before Bunny had been Dr. Bunny Smith, brilliant and exhausted and sharp-tongued, coming home to him like it was the easiest thing in the world. In that life, the fake one, marriage had slipped around them without resistance. It had been coffee cups in the sink. Her shoes by the door. His hand on her lower back in a kitchen that didn’t smell like gun oil. The two of them saying I love you like they had said it every day for years, like there was no blade hidden under the words, no countdown running beneath the floorboards.

And Dean had loved it. That was the thing he still couldn’t stand to look at too directly. He had loved being married to her.

He had loved waking up beside her without needing to check the salt lines first. Loved knowing where she was because she was in the next room, because she was coming home at six, because the worst thing waiting for them was traffic or a bad day or him forgetting to buy milk. He had loved the boring parts. The parts he would’ve mocked out loud if anyone asked because wanting them felt too much like handing the universe a loaded gun and pointing it straight at his chest. But that world had been fake.

This one wasn’t.

This world came with blood in the carpet and ghosts in the walls and angels wearing human faces while they talked about destiny. This world came with pain, and deals, and Hell, and Sam looking worse every week, no matter how much Dean pretended not to see it. This world didn’t let guys like him keep good things. It sure as hell didn’t let them marry their dream girl and drive off into the sunset with the windows down and the music loud, not unless there was a corpse in the backseat or something waiting at the end of the road to tear it all away.

So he’d shoved the idea down. Deep. So deep it couldn’t even grow teeth. He hadn’t let himself think about a ring on her hand or his name tangled with hers in any way that wasn’t desperate and quiet and half-hidden in the dark between hunts. He hadn’t let the idea take root because wanting it was dangerous, and Dean had learned a long time ago that the things he wanted most were usually the first things the world took.

Until Vegas, apparently.

Until tequila and neon and whatever catastrophic hole in judgment had opened beneath their feet last night. Until blackout Dean, stripped of fear or sense or every defense sober Dean had spent years building, had apparently looked at Bunny Norton and decided the thing he wanted was worth saying out loud.

Arthur, whether oblivious to the fact that the floor had just opened up beneath both of them or simply too professional to acknowledge emotional devastation before breakfast, gave another small, courteous nod. His expression remained warm and discreet, a polished mask of service industry calm that suggested he could have announced a murder with the same gentle efficiency and then offered coffee afterward. “I’ll inform the chef that you’re both awake and ready for breakfast,” he said smoothly, folding his hands in front of himself. “In the meantime, please, make yourselves comfortable.”

Dean barely heard him.

The ring still sat heavy on his hand, wrong and familiar and impossible not to feel now that he had noticed it, every tiny shift of his fingers dragging awareness back to the silver band on the wrong side of his body. Beside him, Bunny remained quiet, her own ring resting in her palm like something fragile or dangerous, thumb brushing absently over the diamond without putting it on. Her face had gone distant in a way Dean didn’t like, all the earlier color and hungover irritation drained down into something pale and careful, her mouth set soft but unreadable as if she were trying very hard not to let any one thought get too close to the surface.

Arthur disappeared through one of the suite’s side doors with the silent competence of a man who had been trained not to flee visibly from other people’s catastrophes, leaving the room suddenly too open and too bright around them. The chandelier glittered overhead. Wallace chewed happily on his bone, utterly devoted to being the only creature in the suite having a good morning.

Sam lifted his brows as if he hadn’t just been sitting there in full possession of whatever the hell had happened the night before while Dean and Bunny stood half-dressed, tattooed, and apparently married in the doorway.

“So,” Sam said, unable to keep the amusement out of his voice no matter how hard he clearly wasn’t trying. “How was your first night as a married couple? Honestly, from what I witnessed, I’m surprised you’re both upright.”

Dean stared at him for one stunned second before something hot and sharp cut through the fog in his head. “You remember what happened last night?”

Dean moved before he could fully think better of it, crossing the few steps toward the breakfast table. The suite tilted halfway through the trip, his stomach lurching in protest, and he had to catch himself hard on the back of one of the dining chairs when black spots flared briefly at the edges of his vision.

Sam watched the entire thing with open fascination.

“Oh my God,” Sam said, a laugh breaking through his disbelief. “Are you hungover?”

Dean’s jaw tightened. “Shut up.”

“No, wait, seriously.” Sam set his coffee down, leaning forward like he was observing a rare natural phenomenon in the wild. “You are. You’re actually hungover. I didn’t think that could happen anymore.”

Next to Dean, Bunny sank into the chair beside him like her bones had been liquified. She didn’t so much sit as collapse, folding down into the expensive upholstery with a boneless, tequila-heavy grace that made the chair seem less like furniture and more like the only thing preventing her from melting directly into the floor. Her dark hair fell forward around her face as she leaned both elbows on the table and lowered her head into one hand.

The ring sat on the table now, silver and diamond catching faintly against the cloth, and the sight of it made Dean’s stomach turn again for reasons that had nothing to do with tequila. “Samuel, darling,” she said, voice low and scraped thin with hangover misery, “I need you to give us a full rundown of what the hell happened yesterday.”

Sam’s amusement faltered by a degree as he looked between them, his gaze moving from Bunny’s pale face to Dean’s fixed stare and then back again. For the first time since they’d opened the bedroom door, something like genuine confusion crossed his face. “Wait,” he said slowly. “You really don’t remember any of it?”

Bunny blinked at him, expression flat enough to level buildings. “Sam, it feels as if I’ve been chewing roofies all evening, so I would greatly appreciate it if you skipped whatever clever joke you’re currently preparing and got down to brass tacks.”

Dean lowered himself into the chair beside her with more care than he would have liked anyone to witness, his body still operating under protest as he sank into the expensive upholstery and gripped the edge of the table for balance. Sitting helped, technically, though it also gave his brain fewer things to focus on besides the ring on his hand. “Skip to the important parts first,” Dean said, voice rough and clipped as he forced his attention back to his brother. “Where the hell are we, how’d we get here, and where’s my car?”

“And,” Bunny added, lifting one finger without raising her head much farther, “I would very much like to know whether we actually got married or if this is simply you taking the piss out of both of us.”

Dean nodded once, too quickly, and immediately regretted it when pain flashed behind his eyes. “Yeah. That too.”

Sam exhaled through his nose and reached for a tall glass sitting near the center of the table, reddish and garnished with celery and something green Dean didn’t have the bandwidth to identify. He nudged it toward them carefully, like he was offering aid to a pair of injured animals who might bite him if he moved too fast. “Drink some of this first.”

Bunny recoiled with the slow horror of a woman being offered poison. “If that has alcohol anywhere near it, I may actually be sick.”

“It’s not a Bloody Mary,” Sam said quickly, though his mouth twitched like the comparison had already occurred to him. “Arthur said it’s a hangover cure. Tomato juice, spices, some kind of vitamin thing, I don’t know. He brought it up earlier.” Sam shrugged, then took another sip of coffee with the smug ease of someone whose organs had apparently already begun negotiating peace. “I was feeling a little rough when I woke up, and it helped.”

Dean narrowed his eyes at him. “You don’t look rough.”

“I showered. I’ve been up for a while.”

Dean stared at the glass for a second, then reached for it because he needed something to do with his hands before they started shaking or before he did something worse, like ask Bunny what she was thinking, or look too long at the ring she still hadn’t put on, or let his brain linger on the fact that the woman sitting next to him wasn’t technically his girlfriend anymore.

She was his legal wife, apparently.

Mrs. Winchester.

The words moved through him with a slow, dangerous heat, catching somewhere deep beneath the panic and hangover and sheer absurdity of the morning. If he hadn’t felt like death warmed over, if his skull hadn’t been trying to crack itself open, if Bunny’s face hadn’t gone pale and distant in a way that told him she was about three bad thoughts away from shutting down completely, maybe some stupid, private part of him would have let itself be thrilled. Quietly. Secretly. In some dark, locked room inside his chest where he kept all the things he wanted but didn’t trust himself to touch.

Hell, maybe it already was.

Dean had never thought anyone would want that with him. Not really. He knew what he was. Knew what came with the Winchester name, what followed it like smoke. Blood, bad luck, credit card fraud, demon deals, black eyes in dark rooms, bodies salted and burned before dawn. He knew the version of himself the world got when the jokes ran out and the doors locked behind him, and he had never been dumb enough to imagine somebody looking at all that and thinking husband. Men like him got motel rooms, bar bathrooms, one-night stands with women who never asked for last names, maybe a few weeks of something good before the road or the grave or the family business took it back.

But Bunny knew.

Bunny had been born into the dark, same as him, raised by loss and iron and the kind of love that checked weapons before it checked the weather. She knew what lived under beds and in woods and behind familiar faces. She knew the sound of a shovel biting into frozen ground, the stink of old blood, the specific dead-eyed exhaustion that settled into a person after stitching someone up in a motel bathroom and pretending breakfast would fix it. She had seen him ugly and half-broken and mean with fear, had seen him bloody, drunk, reckless, cruel, scared, damned. She knew every terrible thing attached to his life and had stayed anyway.

And now there was a ring on his finger and one lying on the table between them like a question neither of them was brave enough to answer out loud.

The drink was cold when he lifted it, condensation slick against his fingers, the smell sharp with tomato and pepper and something savory underneath that actually made his stomach settle for the first time all morning instead of revolt. He took a long swallow before he could think too hard about it.

It tasted kind of like a Bloody Mary if somebody had taken the fun out and replaced it with a vitamin aisle. Still, it wasn’t bad. The spice hit the back of his throat, chased by salt and citrus and enough heat to cut through some of the cotton stuffed into his skull, and Dean lowered the glass slowly, breathing out through his nose as the burn settled in his chest.

“Okay,” he said, voice low, eyes still on Sam. “Talk.”

Sam’s expression sobered a little beneath the command, enough that the smug edge finally dulled into something more careful. He set his coffee down and looked between them, gaze lingering briefly on the ring lying untouched near Bunny’s hand before returning to Dean. “Alright,” he said slowly. “What’s the last thing either of you remembers?”

Bunny exhaled through her nose, eyes still half-lidded with misery as she leaned back in the chair. “Poker,” she said after a moment. “I remember the three of us playing poker with some man whose name I’ve already forgotten. After that, everything goes horribly fuzzy.”

Dean frowned, trying to force the memory into shape, but all he got was casino light and laughter and the warm press of Bunny against his side. “I don’t even remember that much,” he muttered.

From across the room, Wallace finally abandoned his bone with a reluctant stretch, front paws pressing into the couch before he hopped down and ambled toward the table like he had decided the family crisis now required his supervision. He stopped between Dean and Bunny, shoved his scarred muzzle against Dean’s knee, and let out a heavy sigh. Dean lowered one hand automatically, fingers sinking into the dog’s fur as Wallace settled there, warm and solid beneath his palm.

“Alright,” Sam said, watching the dog for half a second before he drew in a breath and leaned back in his chair. “Poker was the last thing you remember, then. That tracks, I guess. We’d been at that table for a while. And, to be fair, we were doing pretty well.”

Bunny gave a hollow little laugh into her hand. “Doing pretty well.”

“Okay,” Sam amended, mouth twitching. “We were mopping the floor with everyone who sat down.”

Dean’s fingers stilled briefly in Wallace’s fur.

Sam saw it and lifted one shoulder. “I mean, it wasn’t even close. You were cleaning people out left and right. Bunny won one hand with a straight flush and then somehow convinced the guy across from her to fold on the next one even though she had basically nothing, and Dean, you were doing that thing where you look like you’re not paying attention but somehow know every card that’s been played in the last fifteen minutes.”

“That’s called being good,” Dean said automatically.

“That’s called making casino security nervous.”

“Same thing.”

Sam huffed a quiet laugh, but there was still a thread of concern beneath it now, his gaze flicking over Dean’s face and then Bunny’s. “By that point, though, all three of us had been drinking pretty heavily.”

Bunny finally picked up the hangover cure, sniffed it with the expression of a woman confronting a difficult but necessary medical procedure, and took the smallest possible sip. Her face shifted through disgust, consideration, and reluctant approval in quick succession before she lowered the glass again. “That’s the understatement of the century, isn’t it? I feel as if I’ve somehow got tequila in my eyes.”

Sam’s grin came back, smaller this time. “Yeah, well, you and Dean were drinking tequila like it had personally wronged you.”

Dean scratched slowly behind Wallace’s ear, watching the dog’s eyes half-close in bliss. “Sounds like us.”

“Unfortunately, yeah.” Sam leaned back in his chair. “After poker, you decided to try pretty much everything else. Blackjack. Texas hold ’em. Slots. And the weird thing was, you just kept winning. All of us did. It was like you couldn’t lose. By the time the casino started really paying attention, we had to be up at least a hundred grand.”

Silence dropped over the table. Even Wallace seemed to pause. Dean stared at Sam, waiting for the punchline that didn’t come. “A hundred thousand dollars.”

“At least,” Sam said. “Maybe more. It got hard to keep track once they started comping everything.”

Bunny very carefully set her glass down. “Comping everything?”

“Yeah. Drinks. Food. Poker chips. A host came over, introduced himself, said the Lucky 29 ‘valued guests who knew how to enjoy themselves.’” Sam glanced around the suite, mouth quirking. “Then they offered us this.”

Dean looked slowly around the enormous room again, at the chandelier throwing light over polished marble, the sunken conversation pit, the full bar, the piano, the massive windows with Vegas burning beyond them in morning gold. He thought of Arthur knowing their names, Arthur knowing their breakfast orders, Arthur holding Bunny’s ring like this was all part of a very expensive package.

“They gave us the suite,” Dean said.

Sam nodded. “For the night, yeah.”

Dean stared at him. “Because we were winning.”

“Because you were winning,” Sam corrected. “I helped. Bunny helped. But by then, the two of you were…” He trailed off, searching for a word.

Bunny lifted her head slightly. “Drunk?”

“Magnetic,” Sam said, and then seemed to regret it the second both of them looked at him. “I mean—loud. Not loud exactly, but people were watching. You were both winning, laughing, and getting free drinks from basically everyone. The casino loved you. Or at least they loved the money moving around you.”

Dean swallowed, his hand stilling against Wallace’s head again as another strange little pulse of memory flickered uselessly in the back of his mind. Bunny under casino lights. Her laugh bright and reckless, head tilted back, smoke and perfume and tequila on her mouth. His hand at the small of her back. Chips stacked in front of them in impossible little towers.

Sam watched Dean for a second, expression shifting like he’d caught some flicker of memory cross his face and wasn’t sure whether to press on or let it pass. Then he cleared his throat quietly and continued, his voice a little more careful than before. “At some point after they gave us the suite, I left you two downstairs for maybe an hour. Hour and a half, tops.”

Dean’s hand resumed its slow movement over Wallace’s head, though he didn’t remember deciding to start petting him again. “You left us alone?”

Sam gave him a look. “You’re both adults. You were fine.”

“That’s debatable,” Bunny murmured into her glass.

“I went with one of the Lucky 29 staff members to get our stuff from the other motel,” Sam said, ignoring that. “I figured if they were sending someone over anyway, I should probably go with them before some poor bellhop opened our bags and found the guns, fake IDs, and whatever else we had lying around.”

Bunny nodded faintly, still looking pale as she took another careful sip of the hangover cure. “That was probably wise.”

Dean exhaled through his nose, gaze drifting briefly toward the far wall as if he might somehow be able to see through the hotel and down to wherever Baby was parked below. The thought of someone else handling their things, even with Sam there, scraped unpleasantly against the inside of his skull, but he couldn’t argue with the logic. Their shitty motel room had probably looked like a federal indictment with double beds.

Bunny lowered her glass and looked back at Sam, the little silver ring still untouched on the table near her hand. “That explains how Wallace and our bags ended up here,” she said, voice steadier now, though still rough around the edges. “It does not explain the bit where we apparently got married.”

“I’m getting there. When I got back and dropped Wallace off at the suite,” Sam said, “I was still pretty hammered. So I’m not saying I was operating at full genius level either, but I remember enough. I found you two downstairs near one of the private entrances, and you had just come back from a tattoo parlor.”

Dean felt the corner of his mouth twitch before he could stop it.

“I saw Dean’s,” Sam said, glancing toward the ink visible on Dean’s arm. “The rabbit. I don’t know what you got, though.”

Bunny groaned into her hands. “Please don’t.”

“What was it?” Sam asked, leaning slightly to try and catch her eye. “Because judging by the fact that you look like you want to crawl into the tablecloth and die, I’m guessing it was something stupid.”

Dean felt the smirk creep onto his face before he could stop it.

Bunny heard it somehow, because she lifted one hand just enough to point at him without looking up. “Don’t you bloody dare. It’s so stupid.”

Dean leaned back in his chair, a little too pleased with himself despite the headache still trying to tunnel out through his temples. “It’s not stupid.”

“It is the stupidest thing I have ever done by miles,” Bunny said, voice muffled by her palms. “Possibly the stupidest thing anyone has ever done.”

Dean scoffed. “Oh, come on. It’s not that bad.”

Bunny lifted her head just enough to glare at him through her fingers. “You only like it because it’s your initials.”

Dean’s smirk deepened by half an inch, but the warmth under it surprised him, softening something around the edge of his mouth before he could sharpen it into something safer. “Yeah, I like it,” he said, quieter than he meant to.

Sam, who had apparently caught enough of the shape of that moment to understand, grinned even wider. “Wait,” he said, looking at Bunny again. “Did you actually get Dean’s name tattooed on you?”

Bunny’s hands returned fully to her face with a groan so low and wounded it made Wallace lift his head from Dean’s knee in concern.

Dean glanced at her, making sure she was still hidden behind her palms, then looked back at Sam. “It’s my initials, but hell yes, she did,” he said, shielding the movement from Bunny with his shoulder, and mouthed, very clearly, tramp stamp.

Sam pressed his lips together hard, but the grin broke through anyway, bright and disbelieving and younger than he usually let himself look these days. He leaned back in his chair, shaking his head once as if the two of them had finally exceeded even his generous expectations for disaster. “Wow,” he said, voice quiet with the effort of not laughing outright. “The two of you become expert decision makers when I’m not around, huh?”

Dean muttered something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like shut up, but there wasn’t much bite behind it anymore. The exhaustion had sanded the edge off everything, leaving him sitting there with Wallace pressed warm against his leg, a half-finished hangover cure in his hand, and the woman he had apparently married staring into the middle distance like she was trying to process the fact that she’d tattooed his initials onto her body sometime before dawn.

“After the tattoos, we went back down onto the casino floor for another hour or so,” Sam said. “Maybe a little longer. Honestly, the timeline gets fuzzy after this point for me.” His mouth twitched faintly at something private in the memory. “You started smoking with Bunny, and I do remember that.”

Dean’s brow furrowed slightly. “I don’t smoke.”

“You did last night.”

Dean went quiet.

Sam glanced down at the table for a second before looking back up again, his voice calmer now, less amused and more thoughtful as the shape of the memory settled around him. “You were sharing cigarettes with her. Standing next to a blackjack table and taking drags off of her cigarette like you didn’t have a care in the world.” His eyes flicked briefly toward Bunny. “You guys looked happy, so I wasn’t going to stop you.”

Something moved faintly across Bunny’s face at that, quick enough that Dean almost missed it. Her fingers tightened once around the walls of her glass before relaxing again.

“We kept gambling after that,” Sam continued. “But the weird thing was, it never stopped. You two just kept winning. We all did, honestly, but especially you.” His gaze drifted toward Dean now. “I think you maybe lost three games all night out of… what? Twenty? More than that?”

Dean stared down into his glass, trying to summon any solid piece of it back and getting nothing but fractured impressions in return. Bunny’s perfume. Smoke curling blue beneath neon. The sound of slot machines screaming somewhere in the background, while chips stacked higher and higher in front of them. A laugh against his shoulder. Her hand catching his wrist. Bright casino lights reflecting gold in her eyes.

“It got to the point where people were watching you move between tables,” Sam said quietly. “Not in a bad way. More like…” He searched for the word carefully this time. “Like you were the center of something. Every time one of you sat down somewhere, a crowd started gathering around the table to watch.”

Dean shifted slightly in his chair, uncomfortable for reasons he couldn’t quite name.

“I was at a roulette table when Arthur finally came down to find us,” Sam continued. “By then, I figured maybe the casino was cutting us off or trying to get us upstairs before we cleaned out the entire damn building.” His mouth pulled faintly to one side. “But Arthur told us our reservation was ready.”

Bunny blinked slowly. “Our reservation?”

“Yeah. At first I thought it was dinner or something.” Sam gave a quiet little shrug. “Honestly, it probably should’ve been. All three of us were drunk enough by that point that food might’ve saved everyone a lot of trouble.”

Dean’s stomach twisted unpleasantly beneath the hangover cure.

Sam leaned back slightly in his chair, his expression distant now, eyes focused somewhere past the suite and the sunlight and the breakfast table entirely. “Arthur took us out through one of the private exits near the casino floor,” he said. “There was a car waiting outside. Big black thing. Fancy enough that I was afraid to touch anything in it.”

Bunny let out the faintest breath of laughter at that.

“We drove for maybe fifteen minutes,” Sam continued. “Long enough to get away from most of the Strip. The chapel was sitting out near the edge of everything, all lit up in neon like every other wedding place in Vegas, except this one looked…” He paused briefly. “Kind of sad, honestly. Like it had probably looked exactly the same for thirty years.”

Dean could almost see it. Blue neon buzzing against dark desert air. Heat rising from the pavement even after midnight. Bunny beside him in the backseat with her head tipped against the window and her fingers laced loosely through his while whiskey and tequila softened the edges of every bad decision into something that felt inevitable instead of dangerous.

“There was an Elvis impersonator,” Sam said, and despite everything, his mouth twitched again. “A really committed one, too. Sequined suit. Sideburns. The whole thing.” He glanced toward Bunny. “And these awful fake blue flowers everywhere. There was a guy waiting near the front with paperwork and a ring for Bunny. I’d never seen it before, and I’m honestly still not sure where you got it from.”

Dean looked automatically down at the silver band sitting on the table.

“I probably should’ve asked more questions,” Sam admitted. “But honestly? By then I’d been drinking whiskey neat for five hours, and the two of you looked…” He stopped again, searching. “Happy. You both just looked really, really happy.”

The words settled strangely into the room. Dean’s chest tightened without warning.

Sam looked down at the table briefly before continuing, his voice softer around the edges now, stripped of most of the earlier amusement. “And then, my big brother was standing in front of an Elvis impersonator in his dirty hunting boots, getting married to my best friend.” A faint smile pulled at his mouth. “Honestly, it was kind of a mess. Everybody was drunk, the chapel was terrible, and Elvis cried at one point, but it was your mess. And for what it’s worth, it felt right.”

Sam glanced between the two of them again before speaking, his tone lighter this time, trying gently to pull some of the weight back out of the room without fully succeeding. “I’m just glad you finally got married so you’d have an excuse to flirt as much as you already do.” His mouth twitched faintly. “Not that being unmarried ever stopped either of you before. You’ve both been kind of insufferable for months now. At least now you can blame it on being newlyweds.”

Bunny still sat folded slightly inward at the table, one elbow resting near the untouched ring while her fingers remained curled loosely around the empty glass. The earlier embarrassment had faded out of her face somewhere during Sam’s story, leaving behind something quieter and more distant instead, her gaze fixed on the little silver band sitting against the white tablecloth like she was trying to decide whether it belonged to her at all.

Dean understood the feeling. Because if he was honest with himself, he didn’t really know what to say either.

It all sounded strange coming from Sam’s mouth, disconnected from him somehow, even though every piece of it fit together too well to deny. Vegas. Tequila. Tattoos. Bunny laughing beneath neon lights while he followed her through casinos with whiskey in his bloodstream and his hands all over her. Marrying his dream girl in the middle of the night because, for once in his life, he’d stopped overthinking long enough to just do the thing he wanted. That sounded exactly like something Dean would do.

And still, something about it sat wrong in his chest.

Not wrong in the sense that he regretted her. That wasn’t it. Even half-dead from the hangover and emotionally blindsided before breakfast, he knew that much with terrifying certainty. The idea of Bunny being his wife didn’t feel bad. If anything, that was the problem. Some quiet, traitorous little part of him kept catching on the shape of the word and holding onto it longer than it should have.

Bunny Winchester. His wife. It should’ve felt ridiculous. Instead, it felt dangerous in the way all his favorite things tended to feel.

But the rest of it… the chapel, the blackout drunk vows, the fact that neither of them could even properly remember saying yes—it scraped against something deeper in him that he’d never really let himself look at before. Dean had never allowed himself to think about marriage long enough for the fantasy to grow roots, but apparently, some hidden part of him had still built a picture anyway.

If it ever happened—if there had ever been a world where Dean got to keep something good long enough to marry it—he thought maybe he would’ve wanted something small. Quiet. A courthouse somewhere with Bobby pretending not to get emotional about it and Sam trying not to smile too hard. Maybe dinner afterward at some little diner where Bunny stole fries off his plate and tried to convince him to split a strawberry milkshake with her.

He would’ve wanted her in a real dress. Not expensive, necessarily, because she never cared about things like that nearly as much as other people assumed she should, but something she loved. Something soft and white and hers. He would’ve wanted her to have flowers that weren’t made out of dusty blue plastic. He would’ve wanted her to remember it.

Beside him, Bunny finally reached out and touched the ring lightly with the tip of one finger, her expression distant enough that Dean knew, with a sudden awful certainty, that she was thinking something dangerously close to the same thing.

Dean cleared his throat roughly, dragging himself back toward safer ground before his brain could wander anywhere even remotely useful or honest. “You’re serious about the money thing? We really won over a hundred grand?”

The shift in conversation broke some of the strange stillness hanging over the table. Sam leaned back slightly in his chair again, the softer expression fading into something more familiar and easier to handle. “Yeah,” he said, a faint grin pulling briefly at his mouth. “I haven’t had a chance to sit down and figure out the exact total yet, but my guess is we’re somewhere around a hundred thousand. Maybe a little more.”

Dean stared at him for a second, genuinely incredulous. “A hundred grand,” he repeated, because the number still sounded fake when he said it out loud.

Sam nodded once. “We’ll probably lose a chunk of it to whatever the hotel won’t cover, but even after that? We’re still walking away with a stupid amount of money.”

Bunny let out a soft hum from beside him. “Well,” she murmured, voice quieter than before, “perhaps we can finally stop staying in motels where the wallpaper peels if you breathe too hard near it.”

Dean huffed a laugh at that, low and tired but more genuine than anything that had escaped him all morning. The pounding in his skull had finally dulled from attempted murder down to something survivable, and the awful nausea twisting through his stomach had settled into a manageable ache now that Arthur’s bizarre little miracle drink had worked its way into his bloodstream. Whatever the hell had been in it, the guy deserved a medal.

“Hell of a hangover cure,” Dean muttered, lifting the glass slightly before taking another drink. The spice and citrus burned warmer this time going down, no longer fighting his body so much as dragging it reluctantly back toward functionality. “Seriously. He should bottle this and sell it everywhere.”

Dean leaned back slightly in his chair while Wallace pressed heavier against his leg, the dog seemingly satisfied now that everyone had stopped actively spiraling for the moment. He frowned faintly into his glass.

“You know,” he said slowly, “I’m honestly not convinced the three of us didn’t accidentally brush up against some cursed object last night.” His eyes lifted toward Sam again. “Something like that rabbit’s foot a few years back. The one Bela stole from you.”

Sam’s expression tightened briefly in immediate recognition. “What?”

“I’m serious.” Dean gestured vaguely with the glass. “Think about it. We hit Vegas, and suddenly we can’t lose at anything. Cards, slots, whatever. We win enough money to weigh down the trunk, get a free luxury suite, blackout marry each other, and somehow wake up without one of us missing a kidney.” He squinted faintly. “That’s not how things usually go for us.”

Bunny made a small noise of agreement under her breath. “He does have a point.”

Sam watched him quietly for a second before shaking his head once. “No,” he said. “Trust me, if we’d gotten mixed up with something like that, we’d know by now.”

Dean’s brow furrowed. “How?”

“Because with our luck? Something horrible would’ve happened to balance it out already.” Sam leaned back slightly in the chair, his voice quieter now, more thoughtful than teasing. “I’m chalking it up to the universe giving us a break for one night.”

Dean barked out a quiet laugh before he could stop himself, the sound roughened around the edges by disbelief and exhaustion alike. “Yeah,” he said, leaning back in the chair as he stared out toward the Strip blazing bright beyond the windows. “Like that’s going to happen.”

The room settled into silence after that, not uncomfortable exactly, but weighted in the way things always became around the three of them eventually, every joke and bit of temporary lightness sinking back beneath the reality waiting underneath. Bunny pushed herself slowly up out of the chair.

Wallace’s head lifted immediately from Dean’s thigh at the movement, dark eyes following her with quiet interest while she ran one hand tiredly back through her hair. The motion only succeeded in making the already messy waves worse, strands falling around her face and catching against the collar of the oversized dress shirt she still wore over last night’s skirt. Up close, Dean could see exhaustion settling into her properly now that the adrenaline of the morning had burned off, the sharpness around her eyes softened into something worn thin and thoughtful.

“I think I’m going to shower before my skeleton attempts to leave my body entirely.” Her gaze flicked briefly toward Sam, then Dean, though not quite long enough to settle properly on either of them. “Would one of you mind finding my bag?”

“I’ll get it, sweetheart,” Dean said automatically. The answer came too quickly, instinctive enough that it pulled something small and painful tight beneath his ribs the second it left his mouth. Bunny gave a faint nod at that, murmuring a soft thanks, but she still didn’t really look at him.

Dean noticed. He noticed because Dean always noticed when it came to her. The little absences. The hesitation in her posture. The way her fingers lingered too long around a glass when she was thinking too hard about something. The fact that she still hadn’t put the ring on.

It remained sitting there on the white tablecloth between the empty glasses and breakfast plates, silver catching softly in the sunlight spilling through the windows, untouched. Dean’s gaze snagged on it again despite himself, something low and uncomfortable twisting faintly in his chest at the sight.

Bunny stepped away from the table slowly, Wallace rising to follow her for two hopeful steps before she bent automatically to scratch behind his ears. “Stay with Dean, darling,” she murmured, pressing a kiss between the dog’s ears before straightening again.

Then, before she could think too hard about it, she leaned down slightly and pressed a quick kiss against the side of Dean’s head. The touch was brief, familiar enough to hurt a little. Her hand settled against his shoulder afterward, fingers squeezing once through the fabric of his shirt before she stepped away entirely and started toward the door that led to their room.

Dean watched her go in silence. He watched the sway of her tired posture disappear past the doorway. Watched the sunlight catch in the dark mess of her hair. Watched the woman who had apparently become his wife less than twelve hours earlier walk away without her wedding ring.

And because he was Dean Winchester, because his brain always knew exactly where to sink the knife when left unattended for too long, one ugly, familiar thought rose quietly up through the rest before he could stop it. Maybe he’d done what he always did. Maybe he’d taken something good and found a way to ruin it.

The thought sat heavy and sour in the pit of his stomach while the silence stretched out around the table again. Wallace returned to lean heavily against Dean’s leg with a sigh, apparently deciding the crisis had evolved beyond canine intervention, and Dean lowered one absent hand to the dog’s head without really thinking about it.

Across from him, Sam stayed quiet long enough that Dean knew he’d noticed the shift.

That was the thing about Sam. For all the ways they drove each other insane, for all the secrets and anger and grief currently rotting holes through the middle of both of them these days, Sam still knew exactly when Dean was sinking somewhere ugly inside his own head. And, maybe more importantly, he usually knew when not to shove at it directly.

After a minute, Sam cleared his throat lightly and leaned back a little further in his chair. “So,” he said, tone deliberately casual now, gentler than the teasing from earlier, “can I actually see the tattoo this time? I didn’t get a great look at it last night.”

The question pulled Dean back hard enough that he blinked once before looking over at his brother. Then he huffed a quiet breath through his nose and nodded. “Yeah,” he muttered. “Yeah, alright.”

He reached up and tugged back the sleeve of his shirt, exposing the fresh black lines inked into the inside of his arm once more, the little rabbit sitting stark against his skin. Sam leaned forward slightly to look at it better this time while Dean rested his arm back against the table, sunlight catching briefly against the silver ring on his left hand as the scene around them settled into something quieter, stranger, and infinitely more complicated than it had been when the morning started.

✩

An hour later, Dean stood in front of the closed bathroom doors in the bedroom suite and tried very hard not to feel like a coward.

It wasn’t working.

Bunny had disappeared to shower, and in the hour since, Dean had done what he did best when left alone with too much quiet and too many consequences: he had torn apart every decision he’d made in the last twenty-four hours until there was nothing left but raw nerves, regret, and the familiar rotten certainty that he had managed to ruin something good before he’d ever really gotten to enjoy it.

It was practically a gift at this point, some ugly Winchester talent passed down through blood and bad luck. The ability to find the softest thing in reach and then damage it by accident because he opened his mouth wrong, or held on too tight, or did something stupid before thinking through all the ways it might hurt someone else.

And marrying Bunny in Vegas while blackout drunk? Yeah. That had to be somewhere near the top of the list.

He’d showered in Sam’s bathroom just to kill time, standing under water hot enough to scald until the tequila and cigarette smoke and whatever else clung to his skin finally gave way to hotel soap and the faint soreness of fresh ink. It had helped his headache, at least. Arthur’s miracle drink had taken the edge off the hangover, too, leaving Dean feeling more human than he had any right to after waking up half-dead in silk sheets, but neither the shower nor the food nor Sam’s careful attempts at distraction had done a damn thing about the tightness behind his ribs.

All roads had led him here eventually. Back to their room. Back to the closed bathroom doors. Back to the small silver ring resting in his palm.

He turned it slowly between his thumb and forefinger, watching the diamond catch the soft bedroom light. It looked too delicate in his hand, too clean against the scars and calluses and grease-darkened lines that never really went away, no matter how much he scrubbed. Bunny’s ring. His wife’s ring, technically, though the thought still hit him sideways every time it surfaced.

He didn’t know what he was going to say.

That was the problem. Dean usually had words for things that didn’t matter and nothing but wreckage for the things that did. He could bluff his way through a federal building, talk his way into a morgue, charm waitresses, piss off monsters, lie to cops, lie to victims, lie to himself. But Bunny was on the other side of that door, and somewhere between breakfast and now, the whole shape of the morning had shifted from funny to terrifying to something soft enough that he didn’t know where to put his hands.

He would give her an out if she wanted it. Hell, he’d make it easy. He’d make some crack about annulments and Vegas mistakes and chalk the whole thing up to tequila before she had to ask for it herself. He’d pretend it didn’t gut him. He’d give her time if that was what she needed, give her space, give her whatever version of not being trapped made her shoulders stop sitting so tight beneath his shirt.

But God help him, he was a selfish bastard.

Because underneath all that noble crap, underneath the rehearsed lines and the exit routes he was already building for her with his own two hands, Dean wanted something so badly it scared the hell out of him. He wanted her to open that door and look at him. He wanted her to say she didn’t mind. That it was insane and stupid and too fast and not how she would’ve done it, but she didn’t mind being married to him. Worse than that, he wanted her to say some part of her had wanted it too, that maybe she’d been waiting for him to get his head out of his ass and ask her properly, that maybe the ring didn’t feel like a trap in her hand.

He wanted her not to run. That was the ugly heart of it, really.

Not the chapel. Not the paperwork. Not even the ring. Dean could handle those, could joke around them until they lost their teeth. What he couldn’t handle was the thought that Bunny might look at this mess and see the thing that finally made her step back from him for good. That she might decide he had taken too much, wanted too much, dragged her too far into the wreckage of his life and called it love because he didn’t know how else to keep her close.

Dean looked down at the ring again, letting the quiet stretch around him while his thumb brushed slowly over the small diamond set into the band. It wasn’t flashy. Wasn’t one of those huge, stupid rocks that caught on everything and announced itself before the woman wearing it ever got to speak. Even drunk, even apparently operating on tequila and whatever suicidal burst of honesty had possessed him last night, some part of Dean had known Bunny wouldn’t want that.

She wouldn’t want something heavy enough to get in her way, or expensive-looking enough to make her feel like she had to be careful with her own hand. She’d want something simple. Something pretty without being useless. Something she could wear on a hunt if she wanted to, something she could turn inward against her palm if she needed to throw a punch and still keep the stone from breaking skin.

The thought hit him low and strange, because he hadn’t even seen it on her yet. Not properly. Not where it was supposed to be.

And still, for the better part of an hour, he had imagined it there so many times the image had started to feel dangerous. Bunny’s hand wrapped around a diner mug with the ring catching light against her finger. Bunny cleaning her gun with the diamond turned inward so it wouldn’t snag on the cloth. Bunny flicking ash from a cigarette, silver bright against her skin. Bunny reaching for him in the dark with his initials on her back and his ring on her hand, both of them carrying proof of some reckless, drunken truth neither of them had been brave enough to say sober.

Dean closed his fingers around the ring before the thought could go any further.

He couldn’t stand there forever. He wanted to, maybe. Standing outside the bathroom door with her ring in his fist wasn’t exactly heroic, but it was easier than whatever came next, and Dean had always been good at confusing avoidance with strategy when the thing waiting on the other side had eyes like hers.

Still, eventually, he lifted his hand and knocked.

For a second, there was only the low rush of water somewhere inside the bathroom, the faint shift of movement beyond the door, and then Bunny’s voice called back, softer than usual but steady enough to make something in his chest ache.

Dean pushed the door open.

The bathroom was ridiculous, because of course it was. Marble everywhere, huge mirror, soft lighting, towels folded neatly. Bunny stood at the sink with her back to him, wrapped in one of the casino’s white robes, the fabric plush and loose around her shoulders while damp hair fell down her back in dark, heavy waves. She was working a brush through it carefully, the way she always did when she had the time.

Dean stopped just inside the doorway for half a second.

She looked softer like this. Not fragile, exactly; Bunny could be wrapped in silk and still somehow look like she might gut a man if given sufficient reason. But stripped of the crooked dress shirt and hangover panic and the sharp glitter of breakfast-table horror, she looked quiet. Tired. Bare in a way that had nothing to do with skin. The steam had left a faint flush along her cheeks, and the bruised shadows beneath her eyes were more visible now in the gentle bathroom light.

Her gaze lifted to meet his in the mirror. For a moment, neither of them said anything.

Then Bunny gave him a small smile, the kind that tried to be reassuring and didn’t quite have the strength to make it all the way there. There was something tired sitting behind her eyes, something thoughtful and careful and far away, and Dean felt his fingers tighten around the ring in his palm.

“Hey, princess,” he said quietly.

Her smile softened by a fraction, just enough to hurt. “Hi, cowboy.”

Dean stepped farther into the bathroom and let the door fall mostly shut behind him, though not all the way, some dumb part of him unwilling to make the room feel too closed in when everything between them already felt delicate enough to bruise. He moved until he was beside her at the sink, then settled his back against the counter, one hip braced against the cool marble while he angled himself toward her because looking at her directly felt dangerous and necessary at the same time.

Bunny turned her attention back to the mirror, still moving carefully, still quiet in that way that made him want to fix something without having the first damn clue where to put his hands. Her skin looked clean and soft beneath the bathroom lights, still faintly shiny from whatever lotion she’d found, her cheeks flushed from the shower and her damp hair hanging dark over the white robe.

Dean watched as she opened a little glass bottle from the counter and tipped a few drops of something clear and expensive-looking into her palm before working it slowly through the ends of her hair, fingers combing carefully through the wet strands with a patience she seldom had time for in their real lives.

“You smell nice,” he said after a moment, because it was true, and because it was safer than saying anything else currently sitting like broken glass in his throat.

Her gaze flicked to him, and the smile that touched her mouth this time came a little easier. “Do I?”

“Mhm.”

“I found a few things in one of the drawers,” she said, lifting one shoulder in a small, almost sheepish shrug as she smoothed another pass of oil through her hair. “I thought I might as well try them, seeing as we’ve apparently won enough to pay for this suite three times over. The lotion is rather lovely, actually.”

She lifted her arm toward him without ceremony, wrist offered near his face, and Dean leaned in because apparently he had never once in his life possessed the self-preservation necessary to refuse her when she did anything that soft. He inhaled carefully, catching something clean and green beneath the warmth of her skin.

“Yeah,” he murmured, glancing up at her. “That’s nice.”

“Eucalyptus,” Bunny told him, sounding faintly pleased.

Dean hummed softly, eyes drifting over the absurd bathroom again, the marble and the folded towels and the tiny glass bottles lined along the counter like they belonged to people who had never once washed blood out of their hair in a gas station sink. For a few moments, neither of them said anything. Bunny kept working through her hair, slow and methodical, and Dean let himself watch the routine because he knew she liked this sort of thing when she could get it: good soap, hot water, time enough to brush her hair properly instead of dragging it into a knot because a case was waiting. Little luxuries. Things their lives rarely made room for.

Guilt pinched under his ribs at the thought of interrupting it.

He cleared his throat anyway, quiet and rough. “Found your stuff,” he said. “Bag’s on the bed. Figured you’d wanna get dressed after, unless you want me to bring it in here.”

Bunny shook her head, still watching herself in the mirror as she dragged the brush carefully through another dark section of hair. “I’ll fetch it in a minute. No reason to make you take the extra steps.” Her eyes lifted to his wet hair, still dripping faintly against his collar. “How was your shower?”

Dean glanced down like he’d forgotten evidence of it was attached to his head. “Good,” he said, then nodded once with genuine appreciation. “Pretty damn good water pressure.”

Bunny made a soft, agreeable sound as she set the brush down on the counter. “Excellent water pressure. I could’ve stayed in there another hour if I didn’t feel guilty about wasting that much water.”

Dean’s mouth tugged at one corner before he could stop it, the smile small and private enough that he didn’t bother trying to turn it into a smirk.

That was his Bunny, all right. The woman could walk into some rotting house with a shotgun in hand and blood on her sleeve, could dig up graves in the freezing dark without complaint, could look a monster dead in the eye and call it something rude in that crisp English voice of hers before taking its head off, but the idea of wasting too much hot water in a luxury hotel made her feel guilty.

It should’ve been funny, and it was, but mostly it just did that thing she was always doing to him without meaning to, slipping past the armor and catching somewhere soft. Bunny worried about little things. Not because she was fragile, not because she didn’t understand the shape of the bigger horrors waiting outside the door, but because she did. Because if she didn’t keep one hand on the small, decent things, the dark would take everything else.

Dean had always liked that about her.

He thought, suddenly, of standing with her in a pet store aisle a few weeks back while Wallace sat politely at her feet in his pink collar, scarred face lifted toward the shelves like he understood the gravity of the decision being made. Dean had leaned against the cart for what had to have been ten minutes while Bunny asked the clerk about ingredients, stomach sensitivity, preservatives, whether the food had anything in it that might make a rescue dog’s digestion worse, while Dean pretended to be bored and secretly watched her care so intensely about a bag of kibble that his chest had started hurting in a way he’d had no business letting happen beneath fluorescent lights.

Bunny caught his expression in the mirror and arched a faint brow. “What?”

“Nothin’,” he said, because explaining any of that out loud would’ve required emotional vocabulary he did not currently possess.

She hummed like she didn’t believe him, then reached for a small jar from the counter and unscrewed the lid. “Have you and Sam had any luck locating the enormous pile of money we supposedly won last night?”

Dean nodded, settling more heavily against the counter as he folded his arms over his chest. “Yeah. Sam found most of it. Casino’s still sorting out some of the cash-out stuff, but it looks like the final split comes to around thirty-six grand each.”

Bunny’s hands stilled for half a second against her face. Then her brows lifted, and a slow, disbelieving smile tugged at her mouth as she looked down at the cream shining faintly over her fingers. “Thirty-six thousand dollars,” she repeated softly. “That certainly isn’t pocket change.”

“Nope.” Dean let the corner of his mouth tilt up. “Not unless your pockets are a hell of a lot nicer than mine.”

“They are not,” she said, smoothing the cream over her skin with careful upward strokes. “Though apparently they could be.”

Dean huffed a quiet laugh.

Bunny glanced at him in the mirror, something easier passing briefly through her face. “Do you know what you’ll do with yours?”

Dean shrugged one shoulder, trying to make the question feel smaller than it did. “Probably hang onto it for now. Maybe buy some parts for Baby, do a couple things I’ve been putting off.” He looked down at the tile, then back toward her reflection. “Sam said something about getting a new laptop since his is held together with duct tape and prayer, but I don’t think he knows what he’s doing with the rest yet.”

Dean watched her smooth the last of the cream over her cheek, the motion slow and absent now, like her hands were moving through the routine while her mind stayed somewhere else entirely. “You got any big plans for yours?” he asked, trying to sound casual and mostly landing somewhere adjacent to it. “Thirty-six grand buys a lot of fancy hair oil.”

Bunny gave a quiet huff of amusement, but the smile that followed was small. “I doubt I’ll keep most of it,” she said, setting the little jar back on the counter and wiping the excess from her fingertips with one of the pristine white towels folded beside the sink. “I’ll probably send some to Da, and maybe some to Frank and Spencer. They’ve got a college account started for Lou, and I’m sure they’d be cross with me for sending too much, but I can be very stealthy when required.”

Dean frowned faintly, the name snagging in his head. “Lou?”

Bunny glanced at him in the mirror, then blinked like she’d only just remembered there were whole pieces of her life lately that he’d heard about in summary, not in full. “Oh,” she said softly. “Right. I suppose we never really got a chance to talk about Kentucky, did we?”

“No,” Dean said, careful. “Guess we didn’t.”

For a second, something passed between them that had nothing to do with rings or Vegas at all; a small, old ache from when she’d been away and he’d been in a hospital bed, and everything had gone sideways around them before either of them could catch up. Dean shifted against the counter, turning the ring once more in his closed hand before forcing himself to focus on the safer thread. “How’s Francesca?”

Bunny’s mouth curved immediately, familiar warmth breaking through the tiredness at last. “You know she hates when you call her that.”

“Yeah,” Dean said, letting his own mouth tilt. “That’s why I do it.”

“She’s good,” Bunny said, eyes softening as she looked down at the counter rather than the mirror. “So is Spencer. They’ve got this farm in Kentucky, more animals than sense, and a darling, chubby little boy named Lewis, though everyone calls him Lou. He’s terribly spoiled. Very serious about grabbing hair. Happy baby, though. Really happy.”

Dean leaned against the counter and watched her talk about them, watched some of the tension leave her shoulders without her noticing, and felt that old familiar ache settle somewhere under his ribs. “Sounds nice.”

“It was,” Bunny said quietly. “It was strange, seeing her again. But nice.”

For a few seconds, the bathroom held onto that softness, the marble and steam and eucalyptus wrapping around the silence until it almost felt safe. Dean could have let it stay there. He probably should have. Instead, because he had never known how to leave well enough alone when there was a wound nearby and his fingers were already bloody, he shifted slightly against the counter and looked down at the ring hidden in his palm.

“I remember their wedding,” he said.

It was careful bait, and Dean hated himself a little for setting it out. He didn’t know what he wanted from her reaction except proof of life, maybe. Something. A flinch. A smile. A joke. Anything that told him whether the word wedding had teeth for her now, whether the ring in his hand was a thing she wanted back or a thing she was too polite to run from until he gave her the chance.

When she didn’t say anything, he kept going, because silence had always made him itchy.

“It was fun,” he said, trying to make it sound casual, like his pulse wasn’t beating hard in his throat. “Not really a line-dancing-at-a-wedding kind of guy, but they had an open bar, so, you know. Pretty much guarantees success.”

Bunny’s mouth curved faintly at that, small and distant but real enough to make his chest pull tight. “Frank told me about how much fun you’d had with the open bar.” “Uh oh. Not in trouble, am I?”

“No, darling. You’re not in trouble.” Her smile lingered for another second, eyes dropping back toward the sink, and Dean waited, giving the moment room to turn into something he could read. It didn’t. Bunny just stood there in the soft white robe with damp hair over her shoulder and that careful look settling back into her face, the one that made him feel like she had gone somewhere inside herself and forgotten to leave him directions.

So Dean reached over slowly and opened his hand. The ring sat in his palm for one last second, bright and small and warm from his skin, before he placed it on the counter in front of her.

Not too close. Not pushing it into her hand. Just there, between the little glass bottle of hair oil and the jar of face cream, looking wildly out of place among all the quiet, ordinary things she’d been using to put herself back together.

Bunny looked down at it.

Dean watched her face in the mirror, searching for anything he could hold onto. Surprise. Relief. Panic. Want. But her expression barely moved, and the lack of it hit him worse than any answer she could’ve given. The familiar instinct came before he could bury it. End things before they had the chance to hurt you.

Dean looked down at his boots.

It wasn’t even a choice so much as instinct, his gaze dropping hard to the floor like there might be something there worth studying, something safer than Bunny’s face in the mirror or the ring sitting between glass bottles and expensive cream. His boots looked wrong against the shining bathroom tile, scuffed leather and road dust and stubborn old blood worked into places no polish would ever reach, out of place among all that marble and steam and white towels folded into neat little hotel-perfect stacks. They looked like him, really. Like something dragged in from the road and set down in the middle of a life too clean to want it there.

So he looked at them and missed it.

He missed the way Bunny’s fingers moved toward the ring after that breathless little stillness. Missed the way she touched it first with the barest edge of caution, then curled her hand around it like she was afraid it might vanish if she hesitated too long. He missed the faint, almost helpless pull at one corner of her mouth, the beginning of something small and quiet and terrified that might have been a smile if he’d given it one more second to live. If he’d looked up one second sooner, it might have changed the shape of everything that came next.

Instead, Dean stared at his boots and felt that old rotten thing rise in him, familiar as gun oil, mean as hunger. Cut it off first.

Anything good, anything warm, anything that started feeling too much like it could belong to him if he just stood still long enough to let it settle. Cut it off before it got comfortable. Before it grew roots. Before someone else realized they’d made a mistake and ripped it away from him with both hands. Better to do the damage himself. Better to make it clean, make it easy, make it sound like he was doing the right thing instead of bleeding all over the floor from a wound no one had touched yet.

Dean cleared his throat, and even that sounded wrong in the quiet bathroom. “I think we should get an annulment.”

The words came out low. Rough. Almost casual, if a person didn’t know him well enough to hear the strain underneath. The room went still.

Not loud still. Not dramatic. Just the kind of stillness that settled over something the second after it broke, when the pieces hadn’t hit the ground yet, but everyone could already hear them falling. Dean kept his eyes on the floor because he couldn’t quite make himself look at her, couldn’t watch whatever that sentence did to her face. He could feel her staring at him, though. Felt it on the side of his neck, across his shoulder, somewhere deep beneath his ribs where all the stupid hopeful things had gone suddenly quiet.

After a long moment, Bunny said, very softly, “Oh.”

Just that.

One small word, prim and quiet and flattened at the edges, and Dean hated himself so violently for it that his jaw tightened before he could stop it.

He shrugged. His body knew the motions of not caring, even when his chest felt like it was folding in on itself. “It’s probably for the best, you know?” he said, still looking down, still studying the ruin of his boots against the perfect tile like they had answers. “I mean, things between us have been…” He stopped, rubbed one hand over the back of his neck, and tried again. “They haven’t exactly gotten back to normal.”

He heard her breathe in, slow and careful. Dean kept going before that sound could stop him.

“And I don’t wanna make it worse because we got wasted in Vegas and did something stupid.” His voice caught faintly on stupid, but he shoved past it. “We’ve already been through enough lately. Last thing we need is one drunk mistake setting us back even further.”

Dean swallowed hard, forcing his shoulders loose even though every muscle in his body wanted to lock up. “Whole thing was a bad idea,” he said, quieter now, like lowering his voice might make the lie kinder. “Probably easiest if we just undo it now before it gets more complicated down the line.”

Dean finally made himself look at her. It took more out of him than it should have, lifting his gaze from the floor to her reflection and then, because the mirror felt too indirect for the damage he’d just done, turning his head enough to look at her properly. Bunny stood very still beside the sink, damp hair falling dark over the white robe. Her face had gone quiet in that way that always scared him more than anger did, all the small movements tucked away behind careful eyes as she searched his expression like there might be something written there that his mouth had failed to say.

God, she was beautiful.

The thought came uselessly, brutally, right in the middle of him trying to let her go.

Even pale and tired, even with wet hair and shadows under her eyes and that hotel robe wrapped around her like it belonged to someone who had never once run through graveyard mud with a shotgun in hand, she was the most perfect damn thing he had ever seen. Not perfect, clean. Not perfect, easy. Perfect like herself, sharp and stubborn and soft where she thought no one was looking, freckled and exhausted and standing there with every terrible thing that had ever happened to her still somehow unable to make her cruel.

He loved her.

He loved her so much it felt less like warmth and more like damage, something lodged beneath his ribs that moved every time she breathed. And if she didn’t want this, if she didn’t want him with a ring on his hand and all his wreckage dragged into the open alongside it, then fine. So be it. Dean could live with that, probably. He had lived through Hell. He had lived through worse than heartbreak, technically, even if none of those things had ever stood in front of him smelling like eucalyptus with his ring held in her hand.

Because why the hell would she want this? Why would she want him? He was impulsive and reckless and angry, with a drinking problem the size of Kansas and a talent for turning tenderness into shrapnel. Heaven was trying to jam a hand up his ass and steer him toward destiny like he was some meat puppet with a pretty prophecy attached, Sam was drifting farther from him by the day, and the apocalypse was crawling closer one ugly inch at a time.

Marriage was for people who had futures. Dean had a car full of weapons and a front-row seat to the end of the world.

Bunny looked at him for a long moment, and something in her face shifted, small enough that most people would have missed it. Dean didn’t. He just didn’t know what it meant. Her eyes dropped, and that was when he finally saw the ring in her hand, held against her palm, her freckled fingers curled around the silver band like she had picked it up at some point while he’d been too busy staring at his boots and cutting his own throat before she could do it for him.

His chest gave one hard, stupid pull.

Bunny looked down at it, too.

“No,” she said softly, and the word scraped thin on the way out. She nodded once, but it didn’t look like agreement so much as something she was forcing into shape because he had already given it to her. “No, you’re—” She stopped, swallowed, and tried again with a steadier voice. “You’re right.”

Dean went very still.

Bunny turned the ring slightly between her fingers, the diamond catching the bathroom light in one brief, delicate flash before she closed her hand around it again. “We were drunk,” she said, careful and quiet, every word laid down like she was trying not to disturb something wounded between them. “Very drunk, apparently. And marriage is… it’s a rather large commitment to make because one happens to be on a hot streak in Las Vegas.”

Dean’s jaw tightened so hard it ached. “Yeah,” he managed.

Her mouth moved like she might smile, but it never quite became one. “And we’ve got more important things going on. Angels. Demons. The impending end of days. All very inconvenient, really.” She looked back up at him then, eyes too steady now, too carefully composed. “We’ve already had one relationship-altering conversation in a hotel recently. I think perhaps it’s best we don’t have a second.”

Dean’s throat tightened hard enough that swallowing hurt. He forced his shoulders into something loose anyway, forced his face into something close enough to easy that maybe she wouldn’t see the part of him that had dropped through the floor the second she agreed.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Probably smart.”

Dean made himself smile. It felt wrong on his face, too stiff around the edges, too thin to pass for anything real if she looked too closely, but he put it there anyway because that was what he did. Smile like it didn’t hurt. Shrug like it didn’t matter. Make the wound look smaller than it was so nobody felt obligated to touch it.

Some stupid, selfish part of him had been hoping she would push back, which was the ugliest part of the whole damn thing, really; he’d handed her the knife, wrapped her fingers around the handle, and still some buried piece of him had wanted her to refuse to use it. Wanted her to look at him and call him a coward. Wanted her to say no, Dean, I don’t want an out, I want you.

But his luck, apparently, had run out sometime after the chapel.

“Good,” he muttered, because if he said anything else, he wasn’t sure what might come out with it. His gaze flicked briefly toward the ring still closed in her hand before he forced it away again. “I’m glad we’re on the same page.”

The words sounded awful. Clean. Reasonable. Like something a better man might say if he weren’t using them to cauterize something still alive.

Bunny nodded once, small and careful, her fingers still curled around the ring like she hadn’t quite remembered how to let go of it. “Yes,” she said softly. “Same page, darling.”

Dean pushed away from the counter before the quiet could get its teeth into him any deeper, one hand dragging over the back of his neck while he turned toward the door. The bathroom suddenly felt too warm, too full of steam and eucalyptus and all the soft little things Bunny had used to make herself feel human again, and he hated himself a little for leaving this conversation in the middle of them like smoke damage.

“Me and Sam are gonna go pick up the cars from the old motel,” he said, aiming for practical because practical was all he had left. “Get Baby, grab your Bronco, make sure we didn’t leave anything behind. Shouldn’t be more than an hour, then we can head outta town.”

Bunny looked at him through the mirror rather than turning around, her expression composed enough that he trusted it even less than tears. “Okay.”

One word again. Dean hated how much he heard in it. Hated how little he could trust himself to understand. So he stepped closer before he could think better of it, bent down, and pressed a kiss to the side of her head, just above her damp temple. It was familiar enough to pass for normal if neither of them looked too closely, gentle enough that it nearly undid him anyway.

“Be back soon,” he murmured.

He didn’t look back from the doorway, because if he did, if he saw her standing there with his ring in her hand and that careful, composed look on her face, he wasn’t sure he would survive being noble for another second. He just crossed into the bedroom, pulled the bathroom door quietly behind him without shutting it all the way, and kept moving toward the suite before the stupid, selfish part of him could turn around and beg.

✩

By the time they found the chapel again, the morning had already sharpened into afternoon.

Vegas heat pressed down over everything in a flat, golden sheet, warming the roof of the Impala beneath Dean’s hand and turning the black paint glossy enough to catch warped pieces of the street around them. The Strip sat farther behind them now, all glitter and glass and noise fading into the distance, while this part of town felt quieter in a sadder sort of way, sun-bleached and tired around the edges. A pawn shop squatted on one side of the chapel, windows crowded with guitars, watches, and other people’s bad decisions, and on the other side stood a souvenir store with inflatable dice hanging in the window and a rotating rack of postcards slowly turning in the faint breeze from a rattling outdoor fan.

The chapel itself was called Angel of Love Wedding Chapel.

Of course it was.

The sign hung above the front doors in curling pink and blue neon, dim in the daylight but still faintly glowing like it hadn’t figured out the sun had risen. A painted angel with gold wings and a heart-shaped arrow smiled down from the sign with a bland, cheerful innocence that made Dean want to shoot it on principle. After Heaven shoving its hands into their lives and calling it destiny, the idea that he and Bunny had gotten married in a place with angel in the name felt like the kind of joke the universe told right before it kicked your teeth in.

Dean did his best not to look at it too long.

If he believed in fate, signs, destiny, any of that crap, maybe he would’ve taken it as something. A warning. A punchline. A big blinking arrow over the fact that every time Heaven got anywhere near him and Bunny, things turned sideways and bloody and impossible to explain. But Dean had spent too much of his life watching people dress up bad luck as meaning, and he wasn’t in the mood to start now, not with the air between him and Bunny sitting awkward and sore in the front seat like a third passenger neither of them wanted to name.

The Impala ticked softly as the engine cooled, metal settling beneath the sun. Dean sat there for a second longer than necessary after he put her in park, both hands resting on the wheel while Bunny sat silent beside him, looking out through the windshield at the chapel doors. She was dressed in her own clothes again, though there was still something too careful about her, hair brushed smooth over her shoulders, sunglasses pushed up on top of her head, mouth set in a way that told Dean she was thinking too hard.

Sam was supposed to meet them just outside of town. He’d found a few final chips that never made it to the cashier the night before, tucked into one of the suite’s drawers like drunken squirrels had been preparing for winter, and had offered to cash them while Dean and Bunny took care of the annulment. At the time, Dean had nodded like that made sense. Like splitting up was practical. Like it didn’t leave him alone with Bunny and the bruise he had put between them in that marble bathroom.

Now, sitting outside the Angel of Love chapel in the too-bright Vegas sun, Dean found himself wishing Sam were here just so there would be another voice in the car. Something to fill the spaces. Something to keep him from noticing the way Bunny’s hands rested quietly in her lap, one thumb brushing over the bare finger where the ring wasn’t.

He got out first.

The heat hit him immediately, dry and bright against the back of his neck, and he crossed around the front of the Impala with his jaw set and his keys still in his hand. Bunny had already reached for the handle, but Dean got there before she could open it herself, pulling the passenger door wide and stepping back.

She glanced up at him, and for one second the smallest, saddest hint of a smile touched her mouth. “Thank you,” she said softly.

Dean nodded, because anything more complicated than that felt like it might crack open in his teeth. “Yeah, baby.”

Bunny stepped out into the sun, smoothing one hand down the front of her shirt as the door swung shut behind her with a familiar heavy sound. Dean closed it the rest of the way, palm lingering for half a second on the warm black paint before he forced himself to turn toward the chapel.

“You ready?” he asked.

The question came out low and careful, like he was asking about something ordinary. Like they were heading into a morgue, or a diner, or another one of those roadside museums Sam always pretended not to want to stop at.

Bunny looked toward the front doors. Then she gave one small nod. “Yes,” she said, quiet enough that the traffic nearly swallowed it. “Yes, I suppose so.”

Dean hated the answer, but he had asked for it.

Together, they crossed the short stretch of sunbaked pavement toward the chapel entrance, neither of them close enough to touch and both of them aware of it. At the doors, Bunny paused for half a breath, looking up at the ridiculous painted angel smiling above them with its heart-shaped arrow and cheap gold wings.

Dean saw her notice it. He saw the irony move across her face and disappear before she let it become anything. So he reached past her, pulled the front door open, and held it there. Bunny walked inside without looking back.

The bell above the door gave a bright, brittle jingle as they stepped inside, the sound too cheerful by half as it cut through the hush of the little chapel’s front room. Cool air rolled over Dean’s face, carrying with it the stale sweetness of old flowers, carpet cleaner, and faint cigarette smoke trapped somewhere deep in the walls. The place looked worse in daylight than it probably had the night before, all faded pink walls and glass display cases crowded with plastic bouquets, framed photos, ring boxes, dusty silk ribbons, and little ceramic angels with painted smiles that seemed to stare from every available surface.

Behind the clerk’s desk, a man looked up from a stack of paperwork with the vague, practiced interest of somebody used to strangers walking in hungover, nervous, excited, or all three. Then his face changed completely.

His whole expression broke open into a beam.

“Well, well!” he said, pushing back from the desk so fast his chair squeaked against the floor. His accent was thick and warm, his voice booming in the small room as if he were greeting old friends instead of two people who had absolutely no memory of him. “There they are! My beautiful lovebirds!”

Dean felt Bunny go still beside him.

The man came around from behind the desk with both arms already open, his crooked name tag catching the light where it was pinned to the front of an open Hawaiian shirt. Ernie. Dark hair slicked back from his forehead, beer belly pressing comfortably against a white undershirt, a small stain near the collar, open-toed sandals slapping softly against the floor as he crossed toward them. Everything about him radiated such immediate, unguarded fondness that Dean had no idea what to do with it until Ernie grabbed him into a back-slapping hug hard enough to rattle the last of the hangover around inside his skull.

Dean stood there for half a second with both arms hovering uselessly before awkwardly patting the man once on the back. “Uh. Hey.”

Ernie turned to Bunny next, his expression softening with almost theatrical affection as he gave her a much gentler embrace, careful and brief, the kind someone offered a woman they genuinely liked and did not want to wrinkle. Bunny accepted it with frozen politeness, one hand lifting faintly to pat his arm while her eyes flicked toward Dean over Ernie’s shoulder, wide and unreadable in a way that made Dean’s chest tighten.

“And the bride,” Ernie said warmly when he stepped back, taking one of Bunny’s hands between both of his for a second. “Beautiful then, beautiful now. Still glowing.”

Bunny’s mouth moved faintly. “I’m fairly certain that’s nausea.”

Ernie laughed as if she had said something charming, then bustled back toward the desk with a pleased little clap of his hands. “I am so glad you came. I was just saying to myself, ‘Ernie, you must call down to the Lucky 29 and have somebody come get this for them before they leave town.’ And here you are! Perfect timing. Perfect.”

Dean cleared his throat, glancing once toward Bunny. She was standing very straight now, shoulders tucked into careful composure, sunglasses still pushed up in her hair, her face polite and pale in the overly bright little room.

Ernie bent behind the desk, rummaging through a stack of framed certificates leaning against the wall. “I had your marriage certificate framed, just like I promised. Came out beautiful. Very beautiful. Very classy. You two have taste, even very drunk.” He laughed again, bright and easy, as if the sentence contained no emotional shrapnel whatsoever. “And I tell you, I do not say this to everyone, truly I don’t, but that was one perfect wedding. One of the best we have had here in months. Maybe years. You make a beautiful couple. Beautiful. The way you look at each other, ah—” He pressed one hand briefly to his chest, smiling widely. “The real thing.”

The words made the air between Dean and Bunny tighten by another painful degree.

Dean looked down at the cluttered counter. Bunny looked at a display of silk roses.

Ernie didn’t seem to notice, or maybe he was too happy to let the silence bother him. “And where is the brother? Sam, yes? Big guy. Very serious face until the dancing started.” He pointed at Dean with a grin. “He still owes me twenty dollars from our bet.”

Dean blinked. “Bet?”

“On whether Elvis would cry before the vows were finished,” Ernie said, as if this explained anything. “He say no. I say yes. I know my Elvis. My Elvis is very in touch with the heart. Very in touch.”

Bunny made a tiny sound that might have been a laugh if it hadn’t been swallowed almost immediately.

Dean rubbed a hand over the back of his neck, the movement stiff. “Listen, Ernie,” he said, forcing himself to step into the conversation before the man’s joy could make the whole thing even harder than it already was. “We’re actually here for a different reason.”

“Of course, of course,” Ernie said, apparently hearing something entirely different in Dean’s tone as he finally pulled a frame free from beneath a pile of others with a triumphant little noise. “You want to see it first. I understand.” He set it on the desk between them.

Dean stopped breathing for a second.

There it was.

Their marriage certificate, framed behind clean glass in a simple black frame, official enough to make the whole ridiculous night suddenly solid in a way Sam’s story and Arthur’s congratulations hadn’t quite managed. The paper sat crisp and cream-colored beneath the glass, stamped and signed and real, with decorative little flourishes around the edges and the name of the chapel printed across the top in looping script. Their signatures at the bottom, unmistakable even through the glass. His quick, heavy scrawl. Her more elegant hand beside it. A legally binding piece of paper, framed like a souvenir.

Ernie clapped his hands together once, still beaming at them over the framed certificate like he had just placed a newborn baby on the counter instead of legally binding evidence of a decision neither of them could remember making. “So,” he said brightly, looking between them with open expectation, “what can I do for you, my friends? My Elvis, he comes back at three if you want another picture with him. Better light in the afternoon, too. Very flattering.” His grin widened as if the thought delighted him. “You are welcome to wait here, of course. My wife is making tea in the back. She would be very happy to see you again.”

Dean felt the sentence land somewhere uncomfortable.

Again.

Everybody in this place had memories of them except them. Ernie, his wife, Elvis with the apparently tender heart, Sam, Arthur, probably half the damn casino floor. They existed all over last night in other people’s heads, laughing and drinking and looking at each other in ways strangers remembered fondly enough to beam at them in daylight. Dean stared down at the framed certificate, at his name and Bunny’s sitting side by side under glass, and suddenly the whole thing felt too exposed.

He cleared his throat, trying to make his voice sound normal. “Yeah, uh. Appreciate it, but we won’t be needing that.”

Ernie’s smile didn’t falter yet, though confusion flickered faintly behind it. “No picture?”

“No.” Dean rubbed a hand over the back of his neck, aware of Bunny standing too still beside him, arms close to her sides like she was trying not to take up any more space than necessary. “We’re actually here because the casino said we could come back here to…” He stopped, jaw tightening once around the words before he forced them out anyway. “Get an annulment.”

For the first time since they’d walked in, Ernie went quiet.

The change was immediate enough to feel physical, like somebody had dimmed the room without touching the lights. His wide smile dropped from his face, not dramatically, not with offense, but with such plain disappointment that Dean felt it twist somewhere behind his ribs before he could armor himself against it. Ernie looked from Dean to Bunny, then back again, his brow pulling together beneath the slicked-back sweep of his hair.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I don’t understand.”

Dean swallowed.

Beside him, Bunny’s arms folded slowly across her body, one hand curling against the opposite sleeve like she was holding herself in place. “It’s nothing you’ve done,” she said, voice gentle and careful in that prim way she got when she was trying very hard not to let anything sharper show through. “Truly. You’ve been very kind.”

“But last night,” Ernie said, and there was no accusation in it, only confusion so sincere it somehow made everything worse. “Last night you were so happy. Both of you.” He glanced down at the certificate, then back up at them, his expression softening into something almost pleading. “I have done this a long time. I see many couples. Some are drunk, yes, some are nervous, some are foolish, some should maybe wait until morning.” A faint, sad smile moved across his mouth and disappeared. “But you two… the way you looked at each other. That was not foolish. That is how I look at my wife.”

The words settled into the cluttered little room with all the weight of a hymn in the wrong church. Dean couldn’t look at Bunny.

Bunny’s breath moved quietly beside him, slow and measured, and when she spoke again, her voice had gone thinner around the edges. “We’re sure,” she said, though the pause before it made the certainty sound assembled rather than felt. “But getting married in Las Vegas while drunk was never really part of our plan.”

Ernie looked at her for a long moment, his eyes kinder than Dean knew what to do with.

Bunny’s arms tightened around herself once before she forced them loose, reaching into her bag with careful fingers. “And we’ll need to return the ring we purchased from you as well.” Her mouth moved like she might try to smile, but nothing came of it. “I’m afraid I don’t remember the transaction, but I assume—I assume we got it from here.”

She drew out the ring. Dean’s gaze dropped to it immediately.

The little silver band sat in Bunny’s palm for half a second, catching the daylight from the window in one clean, bright flash, and then she reached forward and placed it gently on top of the desk beside the framed marriage certificate. She didn’t drop it. Didn’t slide it away like something she couldn’t bear to touch. She set it down with the same quiet care she gave delicate things, fingertips lingering for barely a breath before she pulled her hand back.

Dean stared at it. The ring looked smaller on the desk than it had in his palm. Smaller still beside the certificate, and somehow worse.

For a moment, nobody said anything.

The little chapel seemed to hold its breath around them, all faded pink walls and dusty angels and glass cases full of cheap rings reflecting the afternoon light in dull little flashes. Somewhere overhead, an old Elvis song played softly through a speaker that crackled at the edges, his voice warm and grainy and absurdly tender as it drifted down over the cluttered counter, over the framed certificate, over the ring Bunny had placed there with too much care for something she was supposedly giving back. Dean stared at the silver band until his eyes started to burn, then forced himself to look somewhere else and found nothing better waiting for him.

Ernie let the silence sit for a few seconds longer before he nodded once, slowly, his disappointment folding itself into something gentler. “I see,” he said quietly, though the way he looked between them suggested he didn’t. “The Angel of Love, she helps Cupid’s arrow find its way.” His mouth pulled into a faint, sad smile. “But sometimes, maybe, the arrow finds the heart a little too early.”

Ernie turned before either of them could answer, rifling through a stack of folders and loose papers behind the desk with much less of his earlier cheer, his sandals scuffing softly against the worn floor as he searched. “The annulment papers, they are simple,” he explained, voice still warm but quieter now. “There is a forty-dollar filing fee, because I must send it to the city. I have my notary stamp somewhere, one moment. I put it in a very safe place, which means, of course, I do not know where it is.”

Under different circumstances, Dean might have laughed at that. Now he only reached slowly toward his back pocket, fingers stiff as he pulled out his wallet.

Ernie found the papers first, sliding a thin packet free from beneath a laminated price sheet for vow renewals and laying it carefully on the counter in front of them. The pages looked painfully ordinary. White paper. Black ink. Blank lines waiting for names, dates, signatures, neat little boxes for ending something that had apparently begun under neon and tequila and the sound of Bunny laughing at him like there was no apocalypse waiting outside the chapel doors. Ernie placed a pen on top of the stack, then looked between them one more time, his expression softening in that way kind strangers had when they knew they had stepped into grief but didn’t know where the edges were.

“I give you a moment and go find the stamp,” he said, then nodded once to himself and disappeared through a beaded curtain into the back room. The beads clicked softly behind him.

Dean stood very still.

Bunny stood beside him, close enough that he could feel the warmth of her without either of them touching, and when she glanced up at him, he saw the question there before she said anything. Who first. Which one of them was supposed to put their name down and make the undoing real?

Dean knew, with sudden, terrible clarity, that there was no way in hell he could do it. Not first. Maybe not at all.

His hand hovered on his wallet, thumb hooked against the worn leather, but his eyes stayed fixed on the papers, on the clean blank signature line waiting beneath the printed words. He could face down demons, could pull a gun on his own father, could crawl out of a grave with dirt still packed in his lungs, but the idea of signing his name there made something inside him go rigid and cold.

So he did the cowardly thing. He gestured toward the papers without a word, small and stiff, giving Bunny the first move because he couldn’t find the guts to take it himself.

Beside him, Bunny let out a quiet little breath, not quite a laugh and not quite anything else, just air leaving her chest like something had finally settled heavy enough to press it out of her. Dean heard it anyway. Heard all of it. And still, he looked down at his wallet instead of her face, sliding two twenties free with fingers that didn’t feel entirely steady.

Bunny stepped closer to the desk like the distance between her and the papers was something that needed crossing carefully, one small shift of weight at a time. Her hand hovered above the pen for a second before she picked it up, fingers curling around the cheap plastic barrel with a hesitation Dean felt in his own bones. He leaned one hip against the edge of the counter and tried to make himself look casual, tried to arrange his body into something loose and unaffected, but he knew he was failing miserably. There was nothing casual about the way his pulse was beating in his throat, nothing easy about the two twenties held too tightly in his hand, nothing convincing about the way he kept staring at the pen like it was a loaded gun.

Bunny didn’t sign.

Her gaze had snagged on the framed certificate instead, drifting over the cream-colored paper behind the glass, and after a moment, something faint and startled twitched at the corner of her mouth. Not quite a smile, not fully, but close enough to make Dean’s chest pull tight before he could stop it.

“Wow,” she said softly, the word touched with a kind of incredulous wonder that didn’t quite match the misery sitting around them. “We used our real names.”

Dean blinked, then looked down.

Sure enough, there they were, printed neatly beneath the decorative flourish of the chapel’s name, formal and official and absolutely insane in the middle of a town built on bad aliases and worse decisions. Beatrice Chabrier Norton. Dean Michael Winchester. Not whatever fake IDs they’d been carrying last night, not some legally convenient ghosts pulled from their pockets and flashed under casino lights. Their names. Their actual names, sitting side by side behind glass like they belonged there.

Despite himself, Dean felt a small smile tug at his mouth. “Huh.”

Bunny’s eyes flicked briefly toward him. “What?”

“I mean, I’m legally dead,” he said, glancing back at the certificate with a quiet, disbelieving huff. “And we’re both wanted by the FBI, angel. Kinda impressive we managed to make it through the paperwork.”

Bunny looked back down at the frame, her mouth pressing together like she was trying very hard not to let the moment become funny. “I’m wanted by Interpol as well, technically.”

Dean turned his head slowly toward her. For a second, the annulment papers might as well have vanished from the desk entirely. “You’re what?”

Bunny’s eyes stayed on the certificate. “Wanted by Interpol.”

“How the hell are you wanted by Interpol?”

She gave a small shrug, prim and evasive and entirely too casual for the sentence she had just dropped into the middle of the room. “It was this thing in Mexico with Frank when we were younger.”

Dean stared at her. Bunny did not elaborate.

He wanted to ask. God, did he want to ask. There were about fifteen questions already lining up in his head, starting with Mexico? and ending somewhere near why does every woman in my life have a federal record and better secrets than me? But the pen was still in her hand, and the annulment papers were still waiting, and somehow dragging the conversation sideways into whatever international incident she and Frank had apparently caused in their twenties felt like a stay of execution he didn’t deserve.

So Dean just looked back at the certificate, the smile still there but smaller now, aching around the edges. “Right,” he muttered. “Sure. Mexico thing.”

Bunny’s mouth twitched. “Best not to ask.”

“Yeah,” Dean said, though his eyes flicked toward her again. “I’m gonna ask later. You know that, right?”

“I assumed as much, love.”

For one brief second, they almost felt like themselves again. Almost. Standing shoulder to shoulder in a tacky Vegas chapel, staring at proof of their own terrible judgment while calmly discussing legal death, FBI warrants, and Interpol like any of that belonged in a normal afternoon.

She was still looking down at the annulment papers, pen held loosely in her hand, her profile turned toward him in the dusty chapel light. The soft line of her nose, the damp-dark sweep of hair over one shoulder, the careful set of her mouth while she stared at the blank signature line like it might shift into something easier if she only waited long enough. He could hear Ernie moving around in the back room, drawers opening and closing, papers rustling, the faint click and sway of the beaded curtain whenever he passed too close to it, but none of it really mattered. Not the forty dollars still caught between Dean’s fingers. Not the framed certificate. Not the old Elvis song crackling overhead like some ghost of last night had gotten trapped in the speakers.

All Dean could seem to care about was her.

The fresh sting of ink on his arm where some drunken, reckless, honest part of him had chosen a rabbit and called it hers. The faint smell of eucalyptus still clinging to her skin, filling the Impala on the drive over, different from the lavender shampoo he knew by heart and somehow just as right because it was on her. The sound of her laugh that morning, wrecked and hungover and startled out of her despite herself, the way it had warmed the room for half a second, even with rings and missing memories and fear sitting between them.

His Bunny.

Not his because of the name on the certificate, not because of the ring, not because some guy dressed like Elvis had pronounced anything over them while they were too drunk to remember it. His because she had been lodged under his ribs for so long now that he didn’t know how to breathe around the place she’d taken up. His because even standing here, waiting for her to sign away the thing some stupid part of him still wanted, he couldn’t make himself regret loving her.

Her hand had been hovering over the annulment papers for too long.

Ten seconds, maybe. Maybe less. Maybe forever. The pen tip hung just above the blank line where her name was supposed to go, close enough that one small movement would do it, one tiny dark mark that would turn this whole thing into something they could laugh about badly later if they were very careful and very cruel to themselves. Dean stood beside her and didn’t breathe right, his wedding band heavy on his finger and his heart doing something stupid and terrified behind his ribs.

Then Bunny looked up at him.

Her eyes were green and conflicted and so full of things she wasn’t saying that Dean felt the whole room tilt beneath him more violently than the hangover ever had. The pen trembled once between her fingers, barely enough to notice, but he noticed anyway because it was Bunny and because he had spent years learning every little fault line in her when he should have been learning how to survive without wanting her this badly.

She held his gaze for one full beat. Then, barely above a whisper, she said, “I can’t.”

Dean stared at her.

For a second, his brain didn’t catch up. It couldn’t. The words hit some locked, hopeless place inside him and just sat there, too soft and too impossible to make sense of right away. Bunny’s mouth parted slightly like she might say more, but nothing came out, and the pen lowered by an inch in her hand without ever touching the paper.

Then the meaning finally broke open.

Something in Dean’s chest pulled loose so fast it almost hurt.

A slow smile crept across his face before he could stop it, not the sharp one, not the cocky one, not the grin he used to piss people off or cover bleeding. This was smaller. Stunned. Helpless around the edges. The kind of smile he had no defense against because it had slipped out before any of his usual armor could slam down over it. “Yeah?”

In the back room, Ernie swore softly under his breath as the edge of one of the decorative vases clipped his pinky toe with pinpoint cruelty.

“Ah,” he hissed, grabbing the nearest shelf with one hand while the offending vase wobbled dangerously beside his foot. For one sharp, terrible second, he thought it was going to shatter, and then he would have to explain to Seta that he had broken one of her blue glass vases again while searching for the notary stamp. But the vase only rocked once, twice, then settled safely against the floor with a dull little clink, intact and innocent-looking as if it had not just tried to remove his smallest toe from his body.

Ernie glared at it anyway. “You,” he muttered, pointing at the vase, “are lucky she likes you.”

The little storage room behind the chapel had always been crowded, stuffed nearly wall to wall with silk flowers, spare frames, boxes of blank certificates, extra candles, old photo props, binders full of paperwork, plastic doves, sequined jackets, a backup Elvis wig in a bag labeled DO NOT TOUCH, and at least three things Ernie could no longer identify but refused to throw away because the second he did, somebody would surely need them.

Seta was always telling him he needed a better system back here. Labels, shelves, organization, maybe one of those little plastic drawers with the slots and the tiny handles. She had said it just last week while standing in the doorway with her tea in one hand, looking around at the mess with that patient expression she used when she loved him too much to call him hopeless outright.

He hated when she was right. Mostly because she was always right.

Thirty-seven years they had been married now, and Ernie could count on one hand the number of arguments he had won, which was zero. That had been one of the first things marriage taught him. There were victories, and then there was peace, and peace tasted better when Seta was humming in the kitchen and pretending not to smile because he had finally done what she suggested three days ago. Besides, what kind of fool argued too long with a woman who remembered how he took his tea, who still tucked her cold feet beneath his leg on the sofa, who had stayed through leaky roofs and slow seasons and Elvis impersonators with gambling problems?

No, Seta was right. The room was a disaster. And somewhere inside the disaster was his notary stamp.

Ernie bent with a careful grunt, moved the vase out of the path of his other foot, and reached deeper onto the shelf behind a stack of photo albums and a dusty basket of artificial rose petals. His fingers brushed cardboard, ribbon, something sticky he decided immediately not to investigate, and then finally closed around the familiar squared-off handle of the stamp.

“There you are,” he said, triumph warming his voice as he pulled it free. “Hiding from me like a guilty man.”

He straightened with a small groan and called toward the front room, voice carrying through the beaded curtain. “I found it, my friends. We are ready.”

No answer came.

That did not surprise him, not at first. People standing in front of annulment papers did not always answer quickly. Sometimes they cried. Sometimes they whispered. Sometimes they stood there for long minutes staring at empty lines like the paper might choose for them if they waited politely enough. Ernie had learned, over the years, that love made people strange, and fear made them stranger, and that very often the two looked so much alike in the face that only time could tell them apart.

He set the blue vase carefully back where it had been, then thought better of it and moved it two inches farther from the edge. Seta would be proud. Maybe not impressed, exactly, but proud enough. Then he stepped around a box of vow renewal candles, nudged aside a plastic bin full of silk carnations with his foot, and made his way back toward the front of the chapel with the stamp in hand.

The beads clicked softly against his shoulder as he pushed through the curtain. “My friends,” he began, already shaping his face into something gentle enough for whatever he might find waiting on the other side. “We can—”

He stopped.

The front room was empty.

For a moment, Ernie only stood there beneath the crackling Elvis song drifting down from the overhead speaker, not quite surprised and not quite willing to smile yet. The front door had settled shut, the little bell above it still swaying faintly as if it had only just finished ringing. Sunlight slanted through the glass, catching dust in the air, glinting off the display cases and the cheap ceramic angels and the plastic flowers arranged in their tired little vases.

Slowly, Ernie walked back to the desk. The framed marriage certificate was gone. So was the ring.

The annulment papers remained on the counter, but not as he had left them. The pages had been torn cleanly in half, the signature lines split down the middle, the plain legal language broken into two useless pieces beneath the pen. The forty dollars sat beside them, weighted neatly under a ceramic angel with chipped gold wings, enough to cover the fee they would not be using, or maybe simply an apology for making him go look for the stamp.

Ernie stared at the torn papers. Then his smile returned.

Not the broad, booming grin from earlier, not the one he used when couples stumbled in under neon and nerves and champagne courage. This one was smaller. Softer. The kind of smile a man wore when he had been married thirty-seven years and still knew love when it stood in front of him pretending to be practical.

He reached out, gathered the torn annulment papers, and set them aside with a satisfied little nod. “I knew it,” he murmured to the empty room, placing the notary stamp gently down on another cluttered patch of desk. “Cupid, he is never early.”

hello everyone

WELCOME OUT OF THE DIVORCE ERA AND INTO THE THESE TWO ARE LEGALLY WED ERA WOOOOOOOOO

gotcha. fuckin gotcha. had the time of my life writing this one and i hope you got the whiplash of emotions i carefully crafted. oh??? oh you thought they were actually going to go through with the annulment after we've worked so hard to get them together???? WRONG. so wrong im not doin my shaylas like that

have they told each other they love the other person yet? no but like. details

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